The Ark Community In A History Of The World In 10 1/2 Chapters

Julian Barnes’ novel A History of the World in 10 1/2 Chapters,in the form of fragmentariness,portrays the image of ark as a chain of history,present and future.The ark in the novel is the space where the community exists.As the roles are reversed on Noah’s ark,Barnes has insight into the decline and disintegration of ark community through rewriting the sinking of the Titanic and Medusa,the confabulation of the spacecraft to the moon,and imagining a new heaven.This thesis mainly traces Jacques Derrida and Jean-luc Nancy’s theory of deconstructed community to interpret the decline,disintegration and reconstruction of the ark community in the novel.This thesis begins by investigating the silence of the marginal groups on the ark.It raises the problems of exclusivity and egoism between the individual and the community,and dramatizes the blurring line between what is true and what is not on Noah’s ark as well as the class consciousness on St Louis.Further more,this thesis outlines the crisis of disintegration on the ark.It represents the binary opposition between the self and the other in the community,which invokes the relation between the sinking of Medusa and the failure of the project Ararat’s searing for the wreckage of Noah’s ark,and Derrida’s theory of “immunity” and “autoimmunity” has been applied to analyze the hypocrisy of survivors and the darkness of human nature.Finally,chapter three is concerned with the reconstruction of the ark community.On the one hand,the primitive tribe,forgotten by the industrial civilization,is desperate for regaining the power of discourse so as to construct its identity.On the other hand,a spiritual community can be imagined by rereading the Bible,returning to Noah’s ark and regaining the faith of religion.The building of community in this novel differs distinctly from the traditional community’s celebration of equality and fraternity.In the historical context of the absence of individual identity,the traditional community gradually declined but the new community has not been established.As the old community falls apart,the author fails the second time to construct a future community by imagining a new paradise.However,the nostalgia for the old heaven shows that the revival of faith and the reconstruction of moral order is the foundation of a new community.