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

Abstract

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

• the past
• the present
• snapshot
• story
• the sun
• truth