Abstract
Analysing Julian Barnes’s postmodernist novel, Flaubert’s Parrot, this essay shows that the past is exposed as a story and a palimpsest. We demonstrate that in Julian Barnes’s novel, the past is rewritten as a story with various truths about Flaubert’s identity and biography. The past is presented through a series of symbols, being a palimpsestic construct open to our analysis and understanding. The concepts of historical truth, the past, the present, the writer’s voice are approached in a postmodernist manner and are nothing but a palimpsest.