An Analysis of Flaubert's Parrot by Julian Barnes
Book Review Flauberts Parrot by Julian Barnes
By: Maureen Cutajar
Published: December 18, 2009
Literary analysis: Flaubert's Parrot, by Julian Barnes
Julian Barnes’s ‘Flaubert’s Parrot’ thematises the difficulties of interpreting the past and the elusiveness of history. Geoffrey Braithwaite, the narrator, in his relentless pursuit of the relics and mementos of the nineteenth-century writer Gustave Flaubert poses the question:
‘How do we seize the past? Can we ever do so? When I was a medical student some pranksters at an end-of-term dance released into the hall a piglet which had been smeared with grease. It squirmed between legs, evaded capture, squealed a lot. People fell over trying to grasp it, and were made to look ridiculous in the process. The past often seems to behave like that piglet’.[1]
Braithwaite’s attempts to resolve the question of authenticity, which surfaced when he encountered the second ‘authentic’ stuffed parrot that Flaubert borrowed from the Rouen Museum of Natural History, proves to be just like the greased piglet which evaded capture making the pursuers look ridiculous in the process.
‘Flaubert’s Parrot’ raises the issue of the difficulties of both biographical and historical interpretations. The enigmatic and mysterious Gustave Flaubert proves to be as decipherable as the stuffed parrot that Braithwaite equates with Flaubert’s artistic voice. The novel sets forth to cleverly show that Gustave Flaubert can never really be known, for there is no absolute and unified truth of the past, but only a multiplicity of overlapping perspectives, gaps and absences that hinder a reliable account, because ‘what happened to the truth is not recorded’.[2]
Flaubert is ‘the writer as healer’, the writer as butcher, the writer as sensitive brute’, the writer as a ‘sophisticated parrot’, the writer who ‘also saw the underlying inadequacy of the Word’, and can be either ‘as a pertinacious and finished stylist; or as one who considered language
By: Maureen Cutajar
Published: December 18, 2009
Literary analysis: Flaubert's Parrot, by Julian Barnes
Julian Barnes’s ‘Flaubert’s Parrot’ thematises the difficulties of interpreting the past and the elusiveness of history. Geoffrey Braithwaite, the narrator, in his relentless pursuit of the relics and mementos of the nineteenth-century writer Gustave Flaubert poses the question:
‘How do we seize the past? Can we ever do so? When I was a medical student some pranksters at an end-of-term dance released into the hall a piglet which had been smeared with grease. It squirmed between legs, evaded capture, squealed a lot. People fell over trying to grasp it, and were made to look ridiculous in the process. The past often seems to behave like that piglet’.[1]
Braithwaite’s attempts to resolve the question of authenticity, which surfaced when he encountered the second ‘authentic’ stuffed parrot that Flaubert borrowed from the Rouen Museum of Natural History, proves to be just like the greased piglet which evaded capture making the pursuers look ridiculous in the process.
‘Flaubert’s Parrot’ raises the issue of the difficulties of both biographical and historical interpretations. The enigmatic and mysterious Gustave Flaubert proves to be as decipherable as the stuffed parrot that Braithwaite equates with Flaubert’s artistic voice. The novel sets forth to cleverly show that Gustave Flaubert can never really be known, for there is no absolute and unified truth of the past, but only a multiplicity of overlapping perspectives, gaps and absences that hinder a reliable account, because ‘what happened to the truth is not recorded’.[2]
Flaubert is ‘the writer as healer’, the writer as butcher, the writer as sensitive brute’, the writer as a ‘sophisticated parrot’, the writer who ‘also saw the underlying inadequacy of the Word’, and can be either ‘as a pertinacious and finished stylist; or as one who considered language