Modern American drama as a serious form of art is a product of twentieth century. One of the products of Off-Off-Broadway theatre in American Drama is Sam Shepard and one of his significant skills as a playwright is his ability to dramatize instability of the characters and discontinuity of their language. From his earliest one-act plays to his realistic family plays, Shepard portrays characters that refashion themselves and improvise their identities within a matrix of constraints whether these constraints are cultural, familial or personal. In Shepard’s drama his characters appear to be “unfixed” and “fragmented” as Bigsby says, or as Bottoms indicates, are in “state of crisis.” They are given opportunity to perform with voice and gesture on the theme of self. The picture and the idea of the self which is projected in Shepard’s plays, is that of the self continually subject to fracture and change. His characters’ language is also fractured and they inhabit different roles and selves and fragment during the course of the play, and thus damage the continuity of the narrative in the play.Shepard uses language as a poet, and his Characters can be identified by voice, and approached in terms of Mikhail Bakhtin’s notions of dialogism, multivocality and heteroglossia. Shepard’s characters change their personas by changes in their speeches. For him, language is never just words on a page. He creates a special language of discovery, definition and redefinition in an attempt to uncover truth or meaning. In Shepard’s plays, when his characters do not understand each other, he plays with language as he researches for meaning. Shepard’s language of discovery is spoken by the characters that undergo transformations, fluctuate during the play and adopt several roles to speak several languages which are juxtaposed and superimposed simultaneously; languages, which are a range of borrowings, fragmentary and pieced together. He actually plays with the definition and redefinition of language. Sam Shepard’s concept of character is a fragmented and a fractured one. His characters are not “integrated subjects.” They fragment and transform during the play. Because of all this, Shepard’s conception of character is considered to be postmodern. His ability to make use of postmodern techniques in dramatizing his characters has provided the way for the postmodern analysis of his characters. This article that is based on a research project on Sam Shepard\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\'s postmodern plays; will first present an introduction. In this part I will present the position and place of Shepard in the tradition of American drama. The second part that has different sections, will discuss the idea of postmodernism in Shepard\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\'s eight plays, including: Cowboys #2, The Mad Dog Blues, Angel City, Cowboy Mouth, the Tooth of Crime, Geography of Horse Dreamer, Fool for love and Buried Child. The last part of the article, will conclude the essay and presents new areas for further studies.

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