Navigating Impossibility: Possible Worlds Theory and Epistemological Crisis in Julian Barnes’s Flaubert’s Parrot

This paper examines possible worlds theory in Julian Barnes’s Flaubert’s Parrot (1984), arguing that the novel constructs a single but epistemologically unstable textual actual world surrounded by multiple competing epistemic, interpretive, counterfactual, and apocryphal possible worlds. Drawing on the theoretical frameworks of Marie-Laure Ryan, Lubomír Doležel, and Ruth Ronen concerning possible world theory and fiction, it demonstrates how Barnes exploits the ontological instability between actual and possible worlds to interrogate the epistemological foundations of biography, literary criticism, and historical knowledge. The novel’s central quest—to identify the authentic stuffed parrot that Gustave Flaubert borrowed while writing Un Cœur Simple—becomes an allegory for the impossibility of accessing any singular actual world of the past. Through close analysis of the novel’s competing chronologies, contradictory character versions, and proliferating parrots, this study argues that Barnes constructs a heterogeneous possible world in which authentication procedures fail and ontological boundaries collapse. It further examines how the narrator Geoffrey Braithwaite’s obsessive reconstruction of Flaubert’s life generates counterfactual and apocryphal worlds that compete with the historical record, ultimately revealing that all biographical narrative is a form of world-making rather than world-discovering. Finally, it explores how the deferred revelation of Ellen Braithwaite’s story creates a narrative structure in which the actual world of the narrator’s present remains inaccessible until the novel’s climactic chapter. The paper concludes that Flaubert’s Parrot demonstrates that if all worlds accessed through language are ontologically equivalent, then the distinction between historical fact and fictional invention collapses.