Stories We Tell About Ourselves And Others: Identity And Narration in Julian Barnes’s Oeuvre

Abstract

Julian Barnes’s second to last book to date, The Man in the Red Coat (2019), is a work of non-fiction, devoted to the life of the renowned Parisian surgeon Samuel Jean de Pozzi. It is, however, a special kind of nonfiction – in fact, the book illuminates in many ways the narrative practices in Barnes’s work in general. At the same time, it touches on a theme that permeates all of Barnes’s fictional work, namely the construction of identity through the stories we tell about ourselves and that others tell about us. Storytelling thus emerges as a fundamental human trait: it is our responsibility to narrate, for it is only in telling stories that we can grasp the world around us.