Memory, Truth, and Différance in Julian Barnes' The Sense of an Ending
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.13136/2281-4582/2016.i8.379Abstract
Julian Barnes’ successful novel The Sense of an Ending has been generating diverse interpretations, as it is told by a completely unreliable narrator. As it is said in the first part of this article, though, the tendency of the critics so far has been that of trusting the narrator himself in the last confession he makes at the end of his recounting. On the contrary, in the second part of the present essay the author tries to give meaning to the reported story, not through what the narrator says, but through a few proofs scattered all over the novel which demonstrate that even the finale is in essence a lie or, at least, only a partial truth. This is probably because the narrator is being untruthful to himself as well, in order not to feel guilty for a misdeed he committed during his youth. In the last two parts, through references to several French thinkers, the author of the article demonstrates that the bone of contention, that is, what in the end the reader finds out to be the narrator's son, is a form of (in Derrida's terminology) différance, in other words an incomplete identity created by means of the narrator's identification.
References
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---. Flaubert’s Parrot. New York: Vintage International, 1990.
---. The Sense of an Ending. London: Vintage Books, 2012.
Barlow, Adrian. Extramural: Literature and Lifelong Learning. Cambridge: The Lutterworth, 2012.
Barthes, Roland. S/Z. New York City: Hill and Wang, 1975.
Bataille, Georges. “L'apprenti sorcier.” Nouvelle Revue Française n. 298, Paris: Gallimard, 1938. 4-24.
Berberich, Christine. “‘All Letters Quoted Are Authentic’: The Past After Postmodern Fabulation in Julian Barnes’s Arthur & George.” Julian Barnes: Contemporary Critical Perspectives. Eds. Sebastan Groes and
Peter Childs. London: Continuum International, 2011. 117-28.
Brooks, Peter. “The Law as Narrative and Rhetoric.” Law's Stories: Narrative and Rhetoric in Law. Eds. Peter
Paul Brooks and Gewirtz. New Haven: Yale University, 1996. 14-23.
---. Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative. New York: Random House, 2012.
Carpi, Daniela. L'ansia della scrittura. Parola e silenzio nella narrativa inglese contemporanea. Napoli: Liguori, 1995.
Childs, Peter. Julian Barnes. Manchester: Manchester University, 2011.
Colebrook, Claire. “Difference.” A Companion to Derrida. Eds. Zeynep Direk and Leonard Lawlor. Chichester: John Wiley & Sons, 2014. 57-71.
De Lange, Adrian. “The Complex Arhitectonics of Postmodernist Fiction: Hawksmoor – A Case of Study.” British Postmodernist Fiction (Postmodern Studies 7). Eds. D’Haen Theo and Bertens Theo. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1996. 145-65.
Deleuze, Gilles. Difference and Repetition. London: Continuum, 1994.
Derrida, Jacques. “Interview with Julia Kristeva.” Positions, Chicago: University of Chicago, 1981. 15-36.
---. Of Grammatology. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University,1982.
Eco, Umberto. Opera aperta. Milano: Bompiani, 2013.
---. The Role of the Reader: Explorations in the Semiotics of Text. Bloomington: Indiana University, 1979.
Foulquié, Paul. L'existentialisme. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1989.
Fowles, John. The French Lieutenant Woman. New York: Signet, 1969.
Groes, Sebastian, and Peter Childes eds. Julian Barnes: Contemporary Critical Perspectives. London: Continuum International, 2011.
Guignery, Vanessa. “Julian Barnes in conversation.” Cercles, 4 (2002): 255-69.
---. The Fiction of Julian Barnes. Hounmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006.
Hutcheon, Linda. A Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction. New York: Routledge, 1988.
Kermode, Frank. The Sense of an Ending. Studies in the Theory of Fiction. Oxford: Oxford University, 2000.
Lacan, Jacques. The Ethics of Psychoanalysis 1959-1960. New York City: W.W. Norton & Company, 1997.
Lucy, Niall. A Derrida Dictionary. Oxford: Blackwell, 2004.
Malcolm, David. Understanding Graham Swift. Columbia: University of South Carolina, 2003.
Marcel, Gabriel. Du refus à l'invocation. Paris: Gallimard, 1942.
---. The Mistery of Being: Reflection and Mistery. Chicago: Henry Regnery, 1950.
Marcus, Paul. Being for the Other: Emmanuel Levinas, Ethical Living and Psychoanalysis. Milwaukee: Marquette University, 2008.
Marshall, Brenda K. Teaching the Postmodern: Fiction and Theory. New York: Routledge, 1992.
McAdams, Dan P. The Art and Science of Personality Development. New York: The Guilford, 2015.
McBride, William Leon. Existentialist Background: Kierkegaard, Dostoevsky, Nietzsche, Jaspers, Heidegger. New York: Garland, 1997.
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. Phenomenology of Perception. London: Routledge, 2002
Morgan, Michael L. Discovering Levinas. Cambridge: Cambridge University, 2007.
Oró Piqueras, Maricel. “Memory Revisited in Julian Barnes’s The Sense of an Ending” Coolabah, 13 (2014): 87-95.
Pearson, Keith Ansell. Germinal Life: The Difference and Repetition of Deleuze. London: Routledge, 1999.
Ricoeur, Paul. Memory, History, Forgetting. Chicago: University of Chicago, 2004.
Sartre, Jean-Paul. Being and Nothingness: A Phenomenological Essay on Ontology. New York: Washington Square, 1993.
---. Nausea. New York: New Directions, 2007.
---. The Age of Reason. New York: Vintage Books, 1974.
Swift, Graham. Waterland. New York: Vintage Books, 1983.
Somers-Hall, Henry. Deleuze's Difference and Repetition, Edinburgh, Edinburgh University Press, 2013.
Tiersma, Peter M. Legal Language. Chicago: University of Chicago, 1999.
White, Vernon. Purpose and Providence: Taking Soundings in Western Thought, Literature and Theology. London: Bloomsbury, 2015.
Whitman, James Q. The Origins of Reasonable Doubt: Theological Roots of the Criminal Trial. New Haven: Yale University, 2008.
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2016-12-01
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Articles (general section) - British and Postcolonial literatures in English
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