Ultimately, because of the postmodern, or consciously fragmented, nature of The Woman Warrior, Kingston's highly personal autobiography is very Western in character. She is intensely aware that her autobiography is very subjective and that she can present only her version of events, not a version officially sanctioned or approved by the entire Chinese-American community. As such, The Woman Warrior can be considered a postmodern work because of its self-awareness of presenting only one interpretation of truth, which is a tenet of the postmodern literary movement. For example, at the beginning of the memoir's last chapter, "A Song for a Barbarian Reed Pipe," Kingston confesses that her version of events is often her own interpretation of what she hears from someone else and not what she has experienced firsthand. She suggests a parallel between herself and the legendary Chinese "knot-makers" who "tied string into buttons and frogs, and rope into bell pulls. There was one knot so complicated that it blinded the knot-maker. Finally an emperor outlawed this cruel knot, and the nobles could not order it anymore. If I had lived in China, I would have been an outlaw knot-maker." Her life's story is like a knot so complicated that it can never be untied and laid out in a straight line.
Whereas other autobiographers tend to present their life stories as factual, Kingston undermines her own authority as narrator, stressing her subjectivity. She provokes readers into stepping back from the text to reflect upon some deeper implication, or subtext. For example, unlike the other chapters, "At the Western Palace" is written in the third-person, and, given commonly held assumptions concerning the nature of autobiography, or "memoirs," as The Woman Warrior's complete title suggests, we would assume that the chapter objectively recounts reality. However, by declaring at the beginning of the next chapter that she did not personally witness the events in "At the Western Palace," Kingston betrays her own subjectivity. Details described in "At the Western Palace" are of Kingston's own making, designed to illustrate her own agenda and to reveal an underlying truth: Autobiography is as much imagined and fictional as it is factual. Kingston's memoir, so intensively aware of itself and its limitations, is filled with a subjectivity that is the hallmark of a postmodernist text.
