ELTWeekly Vol. 4 Issue#1 | January 2, 2012 | ISSN 0975-3036

After eighteen months of supreme inspiration a book is born. It seems to be like any other volume, but thicker, and its three hundred and fifty seven pages printed in minute fonts may discourage many busy postmodern readers. At first sight, what strikes us most is the lack of ordinal chapters which seem to have been replaced by male names: some are Arthur while others are George but there are also Arthur and George as well as other names. In addition, these chapters make up four macro sections, the first one called Beginnings, the second called Beginning With an Ending, the third  Ending With a Beginning and the last one Ending. Just by looking at this structure the reader may feel that this novel is a story to assemble and not a ready-to-go story. At first sight we are tempted to say that its structure looks postmodern, but there are some elements in the narrative that should be analized in order to definitely call it Arthur and George a postmodern novel by the English writer Julian Barnes.

Before coming to define the subgenre where this novel belongs, it would be very useful to become acquainted with the term pastiche. This term widely refers to a text consisting wholly or largely of direct borrowings from one or more other words.[i] In the case of Arthur and George, we may call it pastiche because it has elements from the historical and biographical novel, as well as elements taken from the mistery and the detective subgenres. Julian Barnes collected as much information as he could from all sort of written records (newspapers, letters, essays, books by the real characters, etc) but since he did not have enough information to build up his characters he had to invent the rest of the data, therefore it could not be called a trully historical novel. (more…)