Narrative Authority and Narrative Time in the British Novel: A Comparative Reading from Defoe to Barnes

Abstract

Historical accounts of narrative form often describe a movement from linear realism to modernist fragmentation and postmodern uncertainty. This article examines the limits of that sequence through a qualitative comparison of selected passages from seven British novels, from Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe to Julian Barnes's The Sense of an Ending. The analysis combines distinctions among narrative voice, focalization, temporal order, and reliability with close reading of identifiable textual sequences. It asks how temporal design shapes claims to narrative authority and whether later techniques replace earlier ones. The comparison identifies retrospective mediation in Defoe, the interaction of character perspective and evaluation in Austen, divided authority in Dickens, layered testimony in Conrad, and coordinated temporal and perspectival movement in Woolf. Ishiguro and Barnes rework retrospective narration to expose the limits of self-interpretation. These readings support an account of formal change as the recombination of narrative resources, rather than a succession of uniformly coherent and fragmented periods. Temporal disorder does not necessarily imply unreliability, while chronological clarity does not establish interpretive authority. The article offers a comparative framework for examining these relations, with conclusions limited to its purposively selected passages and works.