SOURCE: “Interred Textuality: The Good Soldier and Flaubert's Parrot,” in Critique Studies in Contemporary Fiction, Vol. 41, No. 1, Fall, 1999, pp. 45–51.

In the following essay, Brooks analyzes the relationship between Barnes's Flaubert's Parrot and Ford Madox Ford's The Good Soldier.

Books say: she did this because. Life says: she did this. Books are where things are explained to you; life is where things aren't. I'm not surprised some people prefer books. Books make sense of life. The only problem is that the lives they make sense of are other people's lives, never your own.

—Flaubert's Parrot, 168

Toward the end of Flaubert's Parrot, Dr. Geoffrey Braithwaite ironically concedes his own failure because he has putatively tried to write a book to make sense of his own life. At the novel's conclusion, Braithwaite finds himself unable to say with certainty anything about his own life, his late wife, or his various investigations...