Memory Between Distortion and Reconstruction in Julian Barnes’ The Sense of an Ending (2011) and The Only Story (2018)

Abstract

Many contemporary novels are concerned with traumatic events, whether driven by collective experiences such as war, slavery or colonialism, or by more individual experiences as sexual assaults or self-deception. Despite the fact that trauma or traumatisation is not a postmodern theme, trauma has been absorbed into the current ideologies of history and memory. In addition, the relation of trauma and memory to narrative are represented through cathartic writing or writing as healing, which dates back to the middle ages and the practice of confession first introduced in Augustine’s Confessions. The therapeutic role of narrative, however, has revived and flourished in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Julian Barnes is a prominent English contemporary author whose works often deal with the recursive nature of memory, and the individual’s need for redemption and restoration. Barnes’ exploration and examination of memory, history, and narrative in his works is crucial to the understanding of the individual’s struggle to overcome the inner turmoil, imposed upon him through the traumatic past events. In his two eminent narratives The Sense of an Ending(2011) and The Only Story(2018), Barnes engages in a deep discussion on the malleable nature of memory. In his works, Barnes explores how the mind paves the way to unconsciously forgetting fear, denying shame, and reconstructing one’s self by confabulating and repressing parts of one’s memories and rendering them into life narratives. In this respect, this work tackles three issues: First, how does the traumatic experience or ‘‘traumatisation’’ shaped by the historical memory lead to the reconstructive act of narrative? Second, what is the therapeutic effect of turning memory into narrative? Finally, how, in the course of a life, do we edit and erase our memories?