Motif of discrimination in Julian Barnes's novel History of the World in 10 ½ Chapters

Abstract

In this paper we analyse the main motif of Barnes’s History of the World in 10 ½ Chapters - motif of the division between „the clean“ and „the unclean“ .Each chapter of this novel describes some kind of reincarnation and variation of the eternal human need for discrimination – from the ironic account of the biblical creation of the world, to the shameful episode of human history dating from just prior to the outbreak of the Second World War in which many of the world’s free countries refused to allow Jewish refugees to disembark, to the satirical fantasy of heaven as a collective projection of the twentieth psyche. So at the end Barnes „forces“ us o conclude that a world in which no one is discriminated against is merely a dream of what we imagine we want but would actually find intolerably innocuous and tedious.