朱利安·巴恩斯短篇小说的历史叙事分析

Analysis of Historical Narrative in Julian Barnes′s Short Stories

在发表于千禧年之后的短篇小说集《柠檬桌子》与《脉搏》中,步入晚年的朱利安·巴恩斯将写作的笔触更多地聚焦人生感悟。与此同时,他延续了早期作品中对历史主题的关注,主要采用了叙事越界、戏仿传记和文类拼贴等后现代主义的写作手法,希冀读者借由历史人物反观现实生活。通过这些叙事技巧,一方面,作者表达了自我的历史观:历史是众声喧哗、颠覆严肃并且由诸多零散片段组合而成的;另一方面,巴恩斯又试图引导读者跨越历史而反观自我、烛照内心,表现借古鉴今的深刻意味。

In his collections of short stories The Lemon Table and Pulse published after the millennium,Julian Barnes,in his twilight years,focused his writings more on the sentiments of life.At the same time,he continued to care about historical themes as he once did in his early works,mainly adopting postmodern writing techniques such as border-crossing narrative,parody,and genre collage to encourage readers to reflect on real life through the historical figures.This paper argues that through these narrative techniques,on the one hand,the author expresses the historical view of the self,namely,history is a group of voices,being non-serious and composed of many fragmented pieces;on the other hand,Barnes tries to guide readers to go across history and make a self-reflection and review the past so as to understand the present.