Flaubert's Parrot Analysis

The plot, throughout the 20th century, was consistently redefined as a movement and experimented with. Modernist fiction brought a lot of new and innovative ways of constructing novels, from the narrative perspective, character understanding, to the new importance of the language, which became central in matters of plot. Postmodernist novels evolved plot even more, trying to change it in various experimental ways. The given quotes from Virgina Woolf’s “Mrs. Dalloway” and Julian Barnes’s “Flaubert’s Parrot” are both great examples of how the plot changed in the 20th Century. Even if between these two authors are considerable years, and even if Virginia Woolf is part of the modernist movement and Barnes moved on to the Postmodernist movement, with slight

The book is about a man and his search for the parrot that is said to have inspired Flaubert. The novel has a great deal of innovative elements like the structure and style of it. With this book, regarding plot, again, we don’t have the classical beginning, action, ending - we have a book that has a plot that rotates around the narrator’s love of Flaubert. It is as well a novel that has a very innovative type of plot, a novel that is part literary criticism, part bibliography and part fiction. In the given quote, the character talks about his wife that passed away. He tries to describe her in a very unusual way. Thoughts are inconsistent, and they give the impression that the narrator has a hard time describing her. The flow is constantly interrupted, and none of the description seem to finalize, but they actually end up finalizing as a whole. All the small elements, like her inability to be neat, the fact that she was “sick of being loved”, that they were happy and in the same time unhappy, all end up in creating a vivid image of Ellen, even if one that is a little