The rhetoric of factuality and fictionality in Julian Barnes’s the noise of Time and the Man in the Red Coat

Abstract

This article deploys a rhetorical approach to fictionality and factuality to analyze how Julian Barnes builds the portraits of real individuals through these modes in The noise of time and The man in the red coat. Conceptualizing fictionality and factuality as rhetorical resources allows us to understand Barnes’s writing as a separate form. His works foreground the limits and conventions of generic fiction, and he deliberately employs these resources as communicational strategies, subverting readers’ expectations to both biographical and novelistic ends. Barnes uses the biographical mode as a resource for interpretive, affective, ethical, and aesthetic effects in fictional writing, taking his work beyond the novel proper. He also demonstrates the power of fictionality in nonfiction, which can be wielded as an effective tool for coming to terms with the uncertainties and difficulties of biography. In this sense, the novelistic narrative, and biographical craft on display in The noise of time and The man in the red coat enable Barnes to achieve the effect of truth-telling, which, in turn, strengthens generic assumptions about both fiction and fact in the story. Ultimately, his works blur the boundary between imagination and facts, and demand evaluation that takes into consideration the characteristics of both genres.