1 Reconstruction in ‘The Survivor’ by Julian Barnes Helen E. Mundler Etudes Britanniques Contemporaines 54 | 2018 (Re)constructions/(Re)inventions/(Re)mediations in 20 th Century English Literature (online, open access) Recent reconstructions of the Noah myth A History of the World in 10 ½ Chapters (1989) belongs to a generation of rewritings of the Noah myth (Genesis 5: 32 – 9) which has been much worked over: established writers such as Julian Barnes, Jeanette Winterson (Boating for Beginners, 1985), Timothy Findley (Not Wanted on the Voyage, 1984), and Sarah Maitland and Micheline Wandor (Arky Types, 1987) come into this category. A second generation of such rewritings has recently emerged, and includes texts by beacons of their generation such as Margaret Atwood (Oryx and Crake, 2003, The Year of the Flood, 2009 and Maddaddam, 2013), and Maggie Gee (The Flood, 2004), and also lesser-known writers, among them Samuel Taylor (The Island at the End of the World, 2009), Nathaniel Rich (The Odds Against Tomorrow, 2013) and Claire Morrall. (Even if this last author comes into the category of what Northrop Frye calls those who ‘proceed as if the Bible did not exist’ (Frye xxi), failing to reference the Noah myth at all, she nonetheless entitles her 2016 novel When the Floods Came, and the reader has the option of mobilising the biblical story as part of his or her Iserian ‘repertoire’1). While these newer texts certainly open interesting areas for critical investigation, it seems legitimate to return to Barnes’ work and to ask how previous critiques may be developed by the deployment of new strands in literary criticism which have arisen since the text was published. This paper seeks, then, to offer a re-reading of ‘The Survivor’, some thirty years on.