Character Narration and Fictionality in Julian Barnes’s Flaubert’s Parrot
Character Narration and Fictionality in Julian Barnes’s Flaubert’s Parrot

Summary/Abstract: Julian Barnes’s Flaubert’s Parrot is a hybrid book resisting any attempt at genre classification. It also serves as the embodiment of Barnes’s concern and experiment with the interplay of life and fiction. Enlightened by James Phelan’s rhetorical theory of character narration and his rhetorical approach to fictionality, this article examines the form and function of fictionality in Flaubert’s Parrot, to investigate how Barnes fashions a novel that resonates with greater truth than the factual material. It argues that an important aspect of the function of fictionality in Flaubert’s Parrot is that it invites and, indeed encourages, intense readerly involvement and vicarious experience by the use of character narration. Barnes’s pursuit of greater truth in fiction lies in the readers’ search for the emotional authenticity and ethical situation in writing one’s or their own lives during the process of reading, which makes the act of reading rewarding in itself.

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