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Contents

   



(Top)
 


1 Plot introduction  





2 Major themes  





3 References  














The Birthday Boys






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From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
 


The Birthday Boys
First edition
AuthorBeryl Bainbridge
LanguageEnglish
GenreHistorical novel
PublisherGerald Duckworth and Company

Publication date

5 December 1991
Publication placeUnited Kingdom
Media typePrint (Hardback & Paperback)
Pages200 pp
ISBN0-7156-2378-8
OCLC25110855

The Birthday Boys is a novelbyBeryl Bainbridge. First published in 1991, this book tells the story of Captain Robert Scott's 1910-13 expeditiontoAntarctica.[1]

Plot introduction[edit]

Five first-person narratives give different perspectives on the voyage: Petty Officer Taff Evans; the ship's scholar, medic, and biologist Dr. Edward Wilson; Robert Falcon Scott; Lieutenant Henry Bowers; and Captain Lawrence Oates each give their account of the hardships, the problems, and finally the failure of their endeavour: Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen beats them to the South Pole by a month.

Major themes[edit]

Beryl Bainbridge's book unites many features which have come to be seen as typical of Postmodernism: The five tales differ greatly and it is clear that readers are expected to make up their own minds as to the extent of "truth" in historical accounts of the events.[citation needed]

Post-modernist literature often tries to subvert the assumption that there is a definite distinction between the imagined and the real. Traditionally, historiography is concerned with the domain of "truth" and "reality" and literature, on the other hand, deals with the "imaginative". The Birthday Boys blurs the borders between "fact" and "fiction".[citation needed]

References[edit]

  1. ^ Robshaw, Brandon (10 January 2010). "The Birthday Boys, By Beryl Bainbridge". The Independent. Retrieved 17 June 2024.

Retrieved from "https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=The_Birthday_Boys&oldid=1229672376"

Categories: 
1991 British novels
Historical novels
Novels by Beryl Bainbridge
Fiction with unreliable narrators
Novels set in Antarctica
Heroic Age of Antarctic Exploration
Gerald Duckworth and Company books
Robert Falcon Scott
Fiction set in the 1910s
Hidden categories: 
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Short description is different from Wikidata
Articles needing additional references from June 2024
All articles needing additional references
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All articles with unsourced statements
Articles with unsourced statements from June 2024
 



This page was last edited on 18 June 2024, at 02:55 (UTC).

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