The only story by julian barns (1)

The Only
Story
- Julian Barnes

GROUP
TASK
MAHARAJA KRISHNAKUMARSINHJI BHAVNAGAR UNIVERSITY
DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH
assigned by
Dr. Dilip Barad

GROUP MEMBERS
Daya Vaghani
Riddhi Bhatt
Nidhi Jethava
Aditi Vala
Sneha Agravat

TABLE OF CONTENT
Introduction
Key Facts
Characters
Setting
Narrative Technique
Title
Themes
Critics View
Introduction
Official Website
Work Cited
Summary
Learning Outcome

Author’s
Introduction
The Only Story

● Born: 19 January 1946 (age 76)
Leicester, England
● Pen name: Dan Kavanagh (crime
fiction), Edward Pygge
● Occupation: Writer
● Genre: Novels, short stories, essays,
memoirs
● Literary movement: Postmodernism
● Notable awards:
➔ Prix Femina 1992
➔ Commandeur of L'Ordre des Arts et des
Lettres 2004
➔ Man Booker Prize 2011
➔ Jerusalem Prize 2021
● Spouse: Pat Kavanagh(m. 1979,
Died: 2008)
Julian Barnes-Official Website

Works of
Julian
Barnes
The Only Story

WORKS
The Man in the Red Coat
The Noise of Time
Elizabeth Finch
Keeping an Eye Open
The Only Story
The Sense of an Ending

KEY FACTS
❏ Title:- The Only Story
❏ Author:- Julian Barnes
❏ Type of work:- Novel
❏ Genre:- memory novel
❏ When Published:- 1st February 2018
❏ Publishers:- Jonathan Cape
❏ Setting:- "stockbroker belt" outside London,
1960s
❏ Narrator:- Robert Paul
❏ Parts:- Three
❏ Pages:- 213

CHARACTERS
Paul Roberts Susan
Macleod
Mr Gordon
Macleod
Martha
Macleod
Clara Macleod
Joan
Anne
Eric

MAJOR CHARACTERS
Paul Roberts
Susan
Macleod
Mr. Gordon
Macleod-Husband
Martha & Clara
Macleod
Joan
(Friend)
Jack Macleod
Anne (Gf)
Gerald( ex
of Susan)
Paul's University
Friends– Eric, Barney,
Ian and Sam

Minor Characters
● Mrs. Dyer (maid at Susan's home)
● Pedro
● Christine and Virginia
● Cindy ( Paul’s X)
● Uncle Humph-Aunt Florence( In childhood Susan
went to their house on Vacation)
● Maurice( Worked with Reynolds News )
● John Bell & Croyden
● Dr. Kenny (Susan’s Psychiatrist)
MINOR CHARACTERS

Settings of
the Novel
The Only Story

● The Village-Stockbroker Belt
● Tennis Club
● The MacLeod House
● London (Wigmore Street,Henry
Road, SE15)
SETTINGS OF THE NOVEL

Narrative
Technique
The Only Story

● Part One is the boy-meets-woman
narrative, told in the first person.
● Part Two, told in a mixture of first
and second person, is the decline of
the love affair, and
● Part Three is the rest of Paul's life
told mostly in a mix of second and
third person.
● In the last few pages, as Paul says
his final goodbye to Susan, now
sedated in a psychiatric hospital, he
reverts to the first person
Narrative Technique

01
● Love story.
● description of time, place, and environment.
● Relation development of Susan and Paul.
● Behaviour of the young generation toward
their parents.
● Introduction of Eric, Barney, Ian, and Sam.
● Description of Susan's family and
relationship with her husband. Mr. EP means
Mr. Elephant Pants (Mr. Gordon Macleod)
Miss G(Grumpy) and Miss NS(Not So)
(Martha and Clara.).- Daughter of Susan.
PART ONE SUMMARY

02
● The second part of the story begins with the
information about how Paul and Susan sifted
London and from there how they adjusted
things.
● Susan's situation became worse and she
was hospitalised due to over drinking and
here she attacked one nurse.
● This chapter is all about Susan's madness,
Paul's other girlfriend Anne, and Anne's
attitude toward Susan.
● This part ends with "But you begin to
wonder – not for the first time in your life – if there
is something to be said
for feeling less."
Part Two

Part Three
● This Part begins with the second-person
narration.
● Now Paul has a different vision for
looking at sex, as we know that the novel
majorly talks about the theme of memory
at the second page narrated reveal the
role of memory.
● Most of the things belong to Paul's Diary
entries.
● This part opens about every character
like what might happen with other
characters like Mr. Macleod-his death.
03

Continue
● Forced to abandon law, Paul has become an
office manager. He never has another serious
relationship or children. He eventually settles
in a rural village, where he runs the
“Frogworth Valley Artisanal Cheese
Company” and bakes. Still enraged by the
memory of Gordon, he distrusts and despises
men.
● Ending part is very interesting, here is the
hidden mystery unfolded by the narrator and
we came to know what had happened with
Susan, the condition of Paul.

Pain & Fulfillment
1
3
2
4
THEMES
History VS Memory

Theme of Memory
❖ Weakness of memory/imperfection of
memory
❖ Narrative tries to give effect of
fragmented memory
❖ Paul “often forgets” that Susan has
two children. In his mind, she is to be
rescued from her mothering, which
he sees as “rising social acceptance
combined with slow emotional
diminution”.(P-111)
01

Continue…
“I think there's a different
authenticity to memory, and not an
inferior one. Memory sorts and sifts
according to the demands made on it
by the rememberer.”(P-45)

Theme of Love, Loss
and Self-delusion
❖ He, a 19-year-old university student; she, a 48-
year-old married woman and a mother of two; they,
in London’s suburban “stockbroker belt”, sometime
in the 1960s. Their love was by its very nature
disruptive, cataclysmic; but then, if it were not, it
may not have been love, would it have?
❖ The Only Story explores themes of first love, loss,
and self-delusion. It also paints a portrait of a
generation—Barnes’s own—whose ideals have
floundered over the course of the twentieth and
early twenty-first centuries. The novel was
generally well received by critics, who found it a
“somber but well-conceived character study”
(Kirkus Review)
02

Continue…
“Would you rather love the more, and
suffer the more; or love the less, and
suffer the less? That is, I think, finally,
the only real question.”(P-3)

Pain & Fulfillment
❖ In the story’s examination of the various contradictions
and challenges inherent within the concept of love, the
narrative seeks to utilize Paul and Susan’s relationship
as demonstrating how fulfillment and suffering are not
only inevitable in a romantic relationship, but are also
often simultaneous phenomena. The narrative first
introduces this idea by opening the novel as follows:
“Would you rather love the more, and suffer the more;
or love the less, and suffer the less?”
❖ In this way, the narrative immediately draws a thematic
connection between fulfillment and suffering that
underlies the story of Susan and Paul’s relationship. At
first, the narrative highlights the passion and complete
fulfillment that Paul experiences in the early stages of
the relationship: “I was nineteen, and I knew that love
was incorruptible, proof against time and tarnish”
03

History VS Memory
❖ With criticising memory, the novel also
questions history. One of the central
ideas the novel pointed is unreliability
of history.
❖ Personal History
❖ What we believe history as truth is
unreliable.
04

All this means that the exquisite moments – and there are
many – in The Only Story come from its psychological
acuity, especially about how we remember. In Paul’s
narrative, experiences deconstruct themselves and
personalities decay in a devastatingly convincing way. Susan
is at first an alluring, rich, potent presence, full of ironic
turns of speech from which we infer great intelligence; but
she becomes reduced, by the middle of the book, to a series
of repetitive tropes (“A played-out generation … this has all
been frightfully interesting”), while even her nicknames, a
vital part of her charm, are reduced to verbal tics: “Mr EP”
for the man who hits her, “Mr Badger” for Paul. She carries
on asking desperate questions until we, not just Paul,
wonder if we ever knew her at all.
The Only Story - An Exquisite Look at Love
“Over Paul’s
shoulder, we
glimpse other
kinds of love,
less romantic,
more
commonplace,
but also more
generative
(Kate Clanchy,The Guardian)

“If
Flaubert
reimagine
d ‘Cougar
Town,’ this
is the novel
we might
get
(Ron Charles,The Washington Post)
The very Englishness of their affair lends the whole
encounter an extra layer of tweedy oddness. Barnes
emphasizes that Paul’s erotic adventure takes place in a
suburb of London in the 1960s, a realm that not only
represses sexual behavior but even the terms of
censure.There’s a staleness to these themes that’s only
partially camouflaged by Barnes’s elegant style, the way
an expensive cologne might distract us, for a time, from
the mustiness of a well-appointed sitting room. Indeed,
despite its brevity, there’s something claustrophobic
about “The Only Story.”

‘The Only Story’ - Crazy little thing called love
“A haunting
narrative of
an audacious
love — and a
distant
memory of it
— mapped
over decades
In The Only Story, Julian Barnes, arguably one of
fiction’s most elegiac cartographers of the heart and of
the human condition, returns to his ‘first love’, the
Metroland of his debut novel, with a haunting narrative
of an audacious love — and a distant memory of it —
mapped over decades.Barnes, working with the clinical
precision of a cardiac surgeon, lays open the affairs of
their heart with a wrenching narrative that, even when it
doesn’t quite validate the redemptive power of love, is
curiously therapeutic.
(Venky Vembu,The Hindu)

Beautiful But Heartrending, 'The Only Story' Looks
Back At Love Gone Wrong
“The Only
Story is about
losing
control, but
also, losing
the ability to
lose control.
The Only Story is about looking back on a life and trying
to make sense of what happened. It's a heavier, less
suspenseful read, with a focus on love rather than
death. It's also a far more interior and tormented tale,
so excruciating that even its narrator feels the need to
step back from it — retreating from the first person I to
the second person You and finally even further to the
third person He. Barnes explains this narrative self-
withdrawal rather bluntly, "nowadays, the raucousness
of the first person within him was stilled. It was as if he
viewed, and lived, his life in the third person. Which
allowed him to assess it more accurately, he believed."
(Heller McAlpin,NPR)

Official
Website
The Only Story

Learning
Outcome
The Only Story

● It was a good experience for me to learning so many things
about the presentation like to how to adjust images , gif and
map .
● How to work in group at digital platform and many other
things .
Learning Outcome
(Aditi Vala)

➢ Age difference in Love
➢ Passion to achieve something
➢ Don’t rely on memory:
➢ Reading of original novel
Learning Outcome (Daya Vaghani)
I don’t remember when we first kissed. Isn’t that odd? I can
remember 6–2; 7–5;2–6. I can remember that old driver’s ears in
foul detail. But I can’t remember when or where we first kissed, or
who made the first move, or whether it was both of us at the same
time. And whether perhaps it was not so much a move as a drift. Was
it in the car or in her house, was it morning, noon or night? And what
was the weather like? Well, you certainly won’t expect me to
remember that.(P-23)

● Book Reading Process
● Learning how to create a chart in PPT
Learning Outcome
(Nidhi Jethava)

● Reading Process of the Novel
● Taking the Notes
● Difficulties
● About Group Task
Learning Outcome
(Riddhi Bhatt)

WORK CITED
● Barnes, Julian. The Only Story. Penguin Random House UK. 2018. Book. 24
January 2022.
● Book Review of Kirkus https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/julian-
barnes/the-only-story/
● Julian Barnes: Official Website, http://julianbarnes.com/
● Julian Barnes on 'The Only Story' (Published 2018)
● https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/27/books/review/julian-barnes-on-the-
only-story.amp.html.
● McAlpin, Heller, and Julian Barnes. “Beautiful But Heartrending, 'The Only Story'
Looks Back At Love Gone Wrong.” NPR, 17 April 2018,
https://www.npr.org/2018/04/17/600902229/beautiful-but-heartrending-the-
only-story-looks-back-at-love-gone-wrong. Accessed 24 January 2022.
● Vembu, Venky. “‘The Only Story’ Review: Crazy Little Thing Called Love.” The Hindu,
31 Mar. 2018, www.thehindu.com/books/books-reviews/book-review-the-only-story-
by-julian-barnes/article23400945.ece/amp/.

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