Modernism is a cultural movement that developed during the first three decades of 20th century. It marks a cultural revolution aimed at subverting the traditional assumptions about human life and the universe. People lost all the traditional points of reference that assured them a sense in their life. The traditional points of reference collapsed as a result of the studies of scholars like F. Nietzsche, whose famous metaphor “God is dead” very well synthesizes the absurdity of any metaphysical principle on which traditional western culture had based its reason of being. In addition Sigmund Freud in his Interpretation Of Dreams showed how most of people’s behavior is determined not by his rational control but rather by his instinct that is the unconscious part of the mind over which human beings have no control. What’s more, C. G. Jung also contributed studies about the way human unconscious works adding to Freud’s discovery a reflection on our racial memory, and it is exactly according to our racial memory that we respond to the different signs and situations existence brings us to face. In 1910 Albert Einstein in his theory of relativity demonstrated that space and time are no longer to be conceived of as separate phenomena, but they change according to the position of the viewer thus making the vision of reality relative, not definitely defined. Besides, all this implies there are as many realities as the number of viewers on it. It follows that the position of the human being must necessarily become de-centered and the human being whatsoever is and feels displaced and dislocated. Therefore he desperately needs to grasp to somebody or something which may compensate at least partly to the sense of void left by the collapse of certainties on which all traditional western culture was rooted. Not even time could be conceived and perceived of according to traditional standards: in a linear way which implies conceiving of one’s life as a sequencing of events. Time is now a quasi-philosophical if not psychological concept, disrupting linearity standards in favor of a simultaneous concept of time containing all chronological times. Now past and future are included in the present in one’s stream of consciousness. In a few words, according to Bergson’s theory of time the present results from our memories of the past and our future expectations. All that considered, one can easily understand the reason why quest is the keyword of modernism. Quest means a search for a meaning in existence, at the same time implying that modernist thought still looks forward some form of meaning, a possible order, in which to organize one’s existence. No surprise then that even any kind of artistic production coincided with formal research, and this explains also why modernist art besides displaying its meta-artistic nature, is and has always been considered high and elitarian, addressed to a culture of few people, thus creating a somehow cultural divide between popular culture and culture that is high culture. In literature this means modernist production is really demanding for the reader: he is asked for a never-ending cooperation with the text in order for the text to make sense. Modernism better than any time displace its intertextual nature since writers, novelists, poets and playwrights all the same were aware of the workings of intertextuality and of its potential. In 1925 in an essay called “The Narrow Bridge Of Modern Art” Virginia Woolf had defined the novel “that cannibal”, that will devour all other genres. In her personal case the genre to be mainly devoured was poetry. In that, her fiction creates the same effect of poetry: it has got a rhythm of its own. Modernist fiction:
•    Reduces plot to the minimum (storyline generally covers one day);
•    Uses a third person omniscient narrator, who even if apparently eclipsed adopts the point of view of one or more characters in what goes under the name of the shift of the point of view.