Modern and Postmodern Subject Positions: Unreliable Narrators in The Good Soldier and The Sense of an Ending

The present study aims to study unreliable narrators in Julian Barnes's The Sense of an Ending and Ford Madox Ford's The Good Soldier. As Barnes prompts the reader to read his novel in the light of Ford's novel, a comparison between Barnes's unreliable narrator and Ford's unreliable narrator proves inevitable. This study examines the differences between the unreliable narrator of a modern novel and that of a postmodern novel to see if these differences could be accounted for by the fundamental differences between modernism and postmodernism. In order to see how subject positions reflect social orders, this study draws on the theoretical backgrounds of modernism and postmodernism and the debate between Habermas and Lyotard. It studies modernism in the light of fragmentation, scientific method the simultaneous rejection and invocation of the past and relates postmodernism to fluid identity, the uncertainty of history and anti-humanism. This study concludes that John Dowell