NARRATIVE STRATEGY OF MANIFESTATION IN J. BARNES’S “TALKING IT OVER”

Abstract

The implementation of the narrative strategy of manifestation in the work of Julian Barnes “Talking It Over” is examined in the article. In this book, three characters – Stephen, Oliver and Gillian – tell the same story, but each places accents in their own way. The real state of things in this story cannot be established not only because of the a priori bias of the participants in the events, but also because of the imperfection of human memory. The article examines in detail the discourse in which the characters communicate with a certain subject. Despite the fact that this person is devoid of a narrative voice, many indexes in the novel indicate that this subject has his own point of view about the story presented by the heroes. As the narrative develops, the narrator, who speaks in other people’s voices, appears more and more in the novel. The reader analyzes the layout and selection of speech material, headings, replicas of characters answering the questions of the narrator-interviewer, which are not reflected in the text – and thereby gets the opportunity to develop his own position in relation to what happened to the characters, starting from both the words of the characters and the opinion of the narrator: the importance of the reader’s interpretation, necessary for understanding the novel, the content core of which is the position about the absence of universal truths, is emphasized. Consequently, the full functioning of the narrative strategy can be achieved by assimilating by the reader not only the events being told, but also the event of the story itself.