Romanian Journal of English Studies (Dec 2021)

Rewriting the Past as a Snapshot and Story. A Postmodernist Vision on the Concept of Truth and the Present in Julian Barnes’s Staring at the Sun

  • Catană Elisabeta Simona

DOI
https://doi.org/10.1515/rjes-2021-0007
Journal volume & issue
Vol. 18, no. 1
pp. 63 – 69

Abstract

Read online

This essay analyses Julian Barnes’s novel, Staring at the Sun, and shows that the concepts of truth and the present are rewritten stories of the past. In a postmodernist manner, in Julian Barnes’s novel the present is a story to be completed by the readers based on their analysis and understanding of the past.We are not presented a certain truth of the past, which is associated with a snapshot and with a slide, but various interpretations of it in the characters’ stories.

Keywords