The Rise of Post-Postmodernism in the Novels of Julian Barnes: Fabulation of Metarratives in Metroland, Flaubert's Parrot, A History of the World in 10 1/2 Chapters, England, England

The age of postmodernism with its undermining irony, hopelessness, pessimism and the sense of the looming end could not but leave the world in a state of despair, characterised by a propagated rule of the simulacra and the subaltern, hybridism, uncertainty, absence and inconclusiveness. As a result, the world witnessed the appearance of various calls for the re-institution of metanarratives as the only cure to rescue mankind from continuous deferral of signification, which tends to feel secure only with a score of guiding narratives. The same holds true of Julian Barnes’s fiction. While many consider the writer’s works to be typically postmodern, it is far from being so, as alongside the propagation of multiplicity and flexibility of meaning, it emphasises the existence of the Truth and the necessity to fabulate metanarratives, which are the only guiding poles in human progress through life in post-postmodernism.