Great question! Although there are no specific post-modernistic characters in the short story, I think I understand what you mean. Much of the dialogue in Night-Sea Journey actually relates to the theories held by some very famous post-modernist philosophers.
For example, the protagonist, a spermatozoon, admits that his faith in a common Maker is ambivalent at best.
I have supposed that we have ever after all a common Maker, Whose nature and motives we may not know, but Who engendered us in some mysterious wise and launched us forth toward some end known but to Him... I have been able to entertain such notions, very popular in certain quarters, it is because our night-sea journey partakes of their absurdity.
His mention of 'absurdity' is significant. Albert Camus and Soren Kierkegaard are the preeminent philosophers of absurdist theology. Kierkegaard's The Sickness Unto Death and Camus' The Myth of Sisyphus highlight the meaningless of the universe and man's implicit helplessness in the grand scheme of things. Later, you can see our protagonist lending his voice in sympathy to the absurdist labors of Sisyphus:
The thoughtful swimmer's choices, then, they say, are two: give over thrashing and go under for good, or embrace the absurdity; affirm in and for itself the night-sea journey; swim on with neither motive nor destination, for the sake of swimming...
Which is to say, Someone Else's destiny, since ours, so far as I can see, is merely to perish, one way or another, soon or late.
Indeed, if I have yet to join the hosts of the suicides, it is because (fatigue apart) I find it no meaningfuller to drown myself than to go on swimming.
Both Camus and Kierkegaard did not regard suicide as a valid response to absurdism. They believed that the act of suicide was in itself, a meaningless strategy. You can see this in the fourth quote above. The two philosophers however, differed in how one should respond to a meaningless existence. Kierkegaard supported belief and acceptance in what he considered an unproven power above our own (many call this a belief in God or Providence or Intelligent Creation), while Camus believed that resigned acceptance to the absurd condition of mankind was the better response. He advocated the necessity of the human spirit to transcend the absurdist existence by thriving despite the circumstances.
The protagonist also laments other philosophies which try to explain his plight and the plight of millions of his fellow spermatozoa.
A poor irony: that I, who find abhorrent and tautological the doctrine of survival of the fittest... But the doctrine is false as well as repellent: Chance drowns the worthy with the unworthy, bears up the unfit with the fit by whatever definition, and makes the night-sea journey essentially haphazard as well as murderous and unjustified.
His anguish and frustration mirrors that of Friedrich Nietzsche, who some call an early post-modernist, a man who criticized the Darwinian evolutionary concept of the survival of the fittest.
Very likely I have lost my senses. The carnage at our setting out; our decimation by whirlpool, poisoned cataract, sea-convulsion; the panic stampedes, mutinies, slaughters, mass suicides; the mounting evidence that none will survive the journey- add to these anguish and fatigue; it were a miracle if sanity stayed afloat.
Nietzsche calls this confusion and despair the ultimate cost of relinquishing faith in God or traditional morality. Suddenly, the principle reason for existence has been discarded, and the search must commence for new principles to sustain the validity of life.
For Nietzsche, biological evolution is the correct explanation for organic history, but it results in a disastrous picture of reality.
In fact, Nietzsche held that Darwinian evolution led to a collapse of all traditional values, because both objective meaning and spiritual purpose for humankind had vanished from interpretations of reality (and consequently, there can be no fixed or certain morality).
Sources: Rebellion, Loneliness, and Night-Sea Journey
Nietzsche, Darwin & Time: From Scientific Evolution to Metaphysical Speculation
Hope this helps!
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