Reconstructing the Past: A Critical Study of Julian Barnes’s The Sense of an Ending

Abstract

This paper examines how the protagonist of Julian Barnes’s novel The Sense of an Ending (2011), Tony Webster, reconstructs his past through memory and narrative. Tony, an unreliable narrator in his sixties, attempts to decipher the truth and meaning of his past through his fallible memory and limited and insufficient documents. The central argument of the paper posits that Tony’s narration of his personal history holds a comparable level of authority to that found in any traditional historical narration. Therefore, like a professional historian, his narration of the past employs the narrative strategy of emplotment to make his story coherent and persuasive. As Hayden White argued, a historical narration is parallel to storytelling and a historian employs ‘fictive elements’ to make the historical representation comprehensive and sympathetic to the target readers. The paper also throws light on the fragmented depiction of Tony’s past which is effectively linked to his struggle to fully comprehend and cope with his somewhat traumatic history. By incorporating the theories of Hayden White and Pierre Nora to explore the connections and differences between memory, history, and fiction in the novel. The paper contributes to the critical studies of Barnes’s novel by highlighting the ethical and epistemological implications of Tony’s interest in the past and self-historicization, providing a nuanced perspective on the novel.