Deconstruction of the Phallogocentric View in Julian Barnes’s Flaubert’s Parrot

Year 2020, Volume: 14 Issue: 2, 203 - 215, 29.12.2020

Şebnem Düzgün

https://doi.org/10.47777/cankujhss.848881

Abstract

Julian Barnes’s Flaubert’s Parrot (1984) deals mainly with the problematic nature of truth, but it also questions the dichotomy between the self and the other. Barnes depicts the struggle of the male narrator to integrate his self through his deceased wife Ellen, who appears as the “other”. The narrator feels incomplete due to the absence of his wife through whom he defines his self. Hence, he tries to regain his integrity by associating himself with Flaubert, an eminent male writer. Even so, however, he needs his wife, the “other,” to confirm his manliness. Accordingly, the narrator tries to testify his presence by negating Ellen’s body, femininity, and sexual power in his fiction, but he cannot restore his self thoroughly as his wife’s memories continue to overwhelm his mind and narrative. The present study examines the ambiguous relationship between Geoffrey Braithwaite and his wife Ellen through referring to deconstructive and feminist views about phallogocentrism. In so doing, the article seeks to show that the male narrator’s interest about Flaubert and his parrot conceals his obsession to find out the female “other” whose absence damages the cohesion of his male self.

Keywords

Barnes, Flaubert’s Parrot, phallogocentrism, deconstruction, feminism

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