In the Presence of Absence: the Melancholic Narrative of Flaubert’s Parrot

The focus of this paper is mourning, melancholia, and their representations in the narrative of Julian Barnes’s Flaubert’s Parrot (1984). In this postmodern fiction, loss by death is concurrent with the loss of a belief or an ideal, rather than gradually coming to an end, mourning is sustained and endless, and turns into permanent melancholia. Consequently, melancholia disrupts the structure and flow of the narration. The postmodern style of writing in this story indicates a kind of loss that arises when established narratives begin to falter. By employing Freud’s and Kristeva’s psychoanalytic theories of mourning and melancholia, this paper describes a way of reading Flaubert’s Parrot from a literary-critical perspective as an aesthetic response to the loss of a meaningful center in postmodern culture.