The Postmodern Condition

Abstract

The focal point of this dissertation is to demonstrate the continuous demise of religion and Man’s hopeless sustainability of the belief in a divine state/purpose in the face of the post-modern reality. The purpose of this modest thesis is to prove that Julian Barnes’s anxiety in his admission of God and religion as a divine set of abstract foundation resides in the validity of the truthfulness, or even the authenticity of their nature and essence. The latter being the most doubted characteristic which brings about Man’s sceptical position concerning the transcendental. Hence it is the lack of evidence; earthly tangible evidence though, which renders the transcendental uncertain of its being. Postmodernism values the scientifically and empirically sustained truth, the latter being of an eminent foreground in a century which relies on materialistic evidence to forge judgement, knowledge, and sustainability for its legitimacy. This dissertation is created for a try to decipher these turns of belief and disbelief through the analysis of Barnes’s scepticism towards spirituality, yet construed within his research in the history as well as the historicity of the social and individual knowledge of the assumed sacred. Choosing Barnes as the representative figure of both the English and the Western Man in general who, because of their loss of belief in a deity or any transcendental being, has led to a state of an emotional and existential despair. However the resistance against the belief in religion and God is under the assumption that they are “fabulated”, i.e., created by Man, through established institutions, the evidence for which is hardly, if not at all, being proved. My approach is being parted into dilemmatic positions. By referring to Julian Barnes’ Arthur and George and Nothing to be Frightened of, (I give each of these a chapter for analysis in terms of narrative technique as well as thematic approach), I am to decipher both of inhumanity and agnosticism which veil upon the narratives, and thereby reflecting the outside social behaviour; responding reflection and approach to these matters. The other chapter deals with matters of religion and God in terms of their authentic and truthful state/ nature, as being of, or rather emanating from a reported or ‘narrated’ knowledge, the existence of which isn’t rationally sustained.