The Harmony With The "Other":The Construction Of Self In Julian Barnes's Fiction

Julian Barnes is one of the most popular contemporary novelists in Britain.He,together with Ian Mc Ewan and Martin Amis,is known as “the Three Big British Writers”.He was nominated for the Man Booker Prize twice and finally won the prize for The Noise of Time in 2011.Throughout his writing career,Barnes has showed humanistic concerns which haven't gained deserved attention from the critics in addition to their fame for daring artistic and formal experiments.This thesis tries to analyze the construction of self in three novels by Julian Barnes and these novels are England,England(1998),The Sense of an Ending(2011)and The Noise of Time(2016)from the perspective of Bakhtin's Dialogic theory.The construction of self in Julian Barnes' s novels can be divided into three stages:self-loss,self-subversion and self-reconstruction.The process of correcting their false attitudes toward the relationship between the Self and the Other is also their process of self-subversion.Barnes shows readers that in order to establish one's self,it is necessary to respect the status of both sides in the dialogue between the Self and the Other.This paper consists of five chapters.Chapter One introduces Julian Barnes and his literary works,reviews the literary criticism,introduces Bakhtin' s Dialogic theory and briefly presents the structure of and the main idea of the thesis.Chapter Two analyzes the heroin's reconstruction of cultural self in England,England,proposing that the key for it is to be true to the Self which helps her to revive the identification with the authentic culture in the dialogue between the Carnival actors and herself.Chapter Three examines how the narrator reestablishes his moral self in The Sense of an Ending,arguing that its success is attributed to the respect for the Other which helps him to get rid of the values of moral mediocrity of the middle-class in the polyphony of different voices.Chapter Four explores how the protagonist in The Noise of Time reconstructs his artistic self,arguing that the fruit of construction is brought about by the balance between the adherence to the Self and the respect for theOther which prompts him to develop the artistic strategy of being coward hero after the three successive Chronotopes and helps him to break away from the spiritual bondage of the totalitarian government.Chapter Five concludes that Barnes worries about and offers a way out of the identity problems in the post-modern era while rejects the binary opposition between the Self and the Other in traditional thinking and undermines patriarchal myths about the authority,the deceptiveness of bourgeois ideology and the artistic autocracy.