The Past as Story and Palimpsest in Julian Barnes’s Flaubert’s Parrot. Rewriting the Past as Fiction and Biography

Abstract

Analysing Julian Barnes’s postmodernist novel, Flaubert’s Parrot, this essay shows that the past is exposed as a story and a palimpsest. We demonstrate that in Julian Barnes’s novel, the past is rewritten as a story with various truths about Flaubert’s identity and biography. The past is presented through a series of symbols, being a palimpsestic construct open to our analysis and understanding. The concepts of historical truth, the past, the present, the writer’s voice are approached in a postmodernist manner and are nothing but a palimpsest.

Keywords

• biography
• palimpsest
• parrot
• past
• story
• symbols