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On the Ingenious Use of the Montage Strategies in Julian Barnes’s Novel The Porcupine
HE Zhao-hui
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DOI:10.17265/2159-5836/2025.03.001
Shaoguan University, Shaoguan, China
Written by Julian Barnes, a well-known contemporary British writer, The Porcupine is a novel with a touch on Bulgaria’s social realities in the early 1990s. However, it is not a realistic novel in a conventional sense. It is composed of forty-three sections, long or short, fragmented in form and laid out by means of montage strategies. In the novel, Barnes used “continuous montage” and “parallel montage” strategies to unveil the plot and tell the story and employed “psychological montage” and “contrast montage” strategies to showcase characters’ consciousness and personalities. The ingenious use of different montage strategies in the novel challenges the linear narrative paradigm in traditionally realistic novels, enriches its narrative structures and textual dimensions, and highlights its dramatic conflict, hence reflecting the narrative innovation in Barnes’s fictional writing and providing new space for the studies of his novels from the viewpoint of narratology and/or postmodernism.
Julian Barnes, The Porcupine, montage strategies, narrative innovation
Journal of Literature and Art Studies, March 2025, Vol. 15, No. 3, 115-125
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