“Holes Tied Together with String”: Grief in Julian Barnes’ Flaubert’s Parrot

Abstract

Julian Barnes’ Flaubert’s Parrot (1984) is an experimental novel in which the narrator Geoffrey Braithwaite searches for parrots, multiple biographies, and truth(s) about the life of Gustave Flaubert. On the other hand, the novel has an infrastructure about Braithwaite’s personal life and grief that flows simultaneously with the surface layer of the narrative. All these concepts are treated as ‘holes tied together with string’ in the narrative of Flaubert’s Parrot, a phrase used for the definition of biography writing in the novel. With its intertextual, fragmented, parodic, and self-reflexive narrative, Flaubert’s Parrot has been often read and analysed having Postmodern literary theories in mind, centralising the experimental aspects of the novel. In this regard, Flaubert’s Parrot is a fruitful source to analyse with the postmodern consciousness as the novel approaches to past, history, biography and truth from the perspective that views these concepts not as solid, reliable or static, but as fluid, vague, and multiple. However, the infrastructure of the novel that is related with the loss of Braithwaite’s wife Ellen occupies an essential part in the novel, forming its raison d’etre as Braithwaite indicates that “Ellen’s is a true story; perhaps it is even the reason why I am telling you Flaubert’s story instead” (2012, p. 86). This study, by making specific references to Barnes’ memoir titled Levels of Life, attempts to present how Braithwaite manages to insert his grief under the narrative of the search of Flaubert, his biography and his parrots. The study also compares Braithwaite’s approach to grief and mourning with the Freudian sense of the concepts.