The Pursuit of Meaning in the Early Novels of Julian Barnes

This book examines the notion of the pursuit of meaning in Julian Barnes’s three consecutive novels: Flaubert’s Parrot (1984), Staring at the Sun (1986) and A History of the World in 10 ½ Chapters (1989). The first chapter situates Barnes’s novels in the context of the discourses of postmodernism. The focus of Chapter Two is a search for the consolations and reassurances of religion in Staring at the Sun. Chapter Three explores the pursuit of meaning through art as enacted in Flaubert’s Parrot and flags the contending approaches to art that are confronted in the text. The last chapter is devoted to “Parenthesis,” the half-chapter of A History of the World in 10 ½ Chapters, and considers love’s capacity to transcend the entropy and relativity of the disillusioned world of postmodernity.