The French Lieutenant's Woman: novel as a palimpsest

In the present work I set myself a task to interpret John Fowles's novel The French Lieutenant's Woman, probably author's most famous book. There were several reason why I chose this book: first, it was the book itself - the themes dealt with and the problems to which the book paid attention. Secondly, it was the significance of the book (and a kind of narrative strategy embraced here) for further development of British prose writing, especially for so called "middle generation" authors such as Salman Rushdie, Martin Amis Julian Barnes, Peter Ackroyd, Graham Swift and others. It was mainly because of the second reason that I decided not to interpret the novel along "existential" line which is what have been recently done by many Fowlesian critics. I did not regard the stance of the author, or the so called "authorial intention," to be something endowed with real "authority" - this approach I attempted to justify in the introduction. Instead of "authorial intention" I paid attention to various narrati ve strategies employed in the text - it is significant that one of these is the "unreliable narrator" which, I think, supports my approach in not regarding what the narrator (or the author outside his text) says as something unquestionable. In the first part of my work I thus dealt with the question whether Mr...