Hello Readers! I am the student of English Language and Literature, and here i would like to share my academic work.

1. Welcome
❖ Name: Virani Dhara R.
❖ Sem: 4 M. A. English
❖ Roll no:04
❖ Subject: The New Literature
❖ Email id: dharavirani601@gmail.com
❖ Submitted to: smt Gardi English Dept. MKBU
❖ Year: 2019-2021

2. Memory and
Retrospect in
Julian Barnes’ The
Sense of an
Ending

3. Piqueras writes that,
“ Our memories are strongly influenced
by our feeling, beliefs and the
knowledge obtained after living a
specific experience”
(piqueras, 2014,90)

4. In The Sense of an Ending, Julian Barnes uses
retrospective narration to evoke an unreliable
protagonist and explore this concept: specifically,
the repression, distortion and fallibility of memory
Barnes intends to question the reliability of
memory and retrospective.

5. The Sense of an Ending is divided into two section:
Part one and Part two.
In the first part of the plot, Barnes’ protagonist Tony
Webster recounts experiences from his past, initially
ascribing no particularly meaning to them.
Specifically, he recalls his school days with his friends
Adrian, his experiences at university with his first
girlfriend Veronica, her subsequent relationship with
Adrian, and Adrian’s unexplained suicide.

6. Forty years after these events, the present-day Tony
is comfortably retired, It is only when he received an
unexpected inheritance from Sarah Ford Veronica’s
mother.
Although Tony thinks his memories are truthful, he
soon finds out that he is wrong, and he realises that
significant events in his life do not…
“ have the meaning he has self-servingly ascribed to
them” (Holme, 2015,27)

7. From the beginning of the novel, the inaccuracies
of memory are highlighted. Tony lists a series of
seemingly random images which he ‘remember’.
The list is immediately indicative of the ideas which
Barnes explores in the novel, and it is evident from
the offset that the text will examine the extent to
which memory can be manipulated.

8. However, one of these ‘memories’- “bathwater long
gone cold behind a locked door” (SOAE, 3) is something
that he paradoxically admits,
“ Isn't something that I actually saw, but what you end
up remembering isn't always the same as what you have
witnessed” (SOAE, 3)
Clearly, from the beginning of the novel, Tony
engages with his own unreliability and acknowledges
that memory is fallible.

9. The theme of liquid which is symbolically evoked in
each of the images
● “ A wet sink”
● “ Sperm circling a plughole”
● “ A river rushing nonsensically upstream”
(SOAE, 3)
is evocative of memory’s fluidity.

10. Thus, the nature of memory and retrospect are going to be
questioned.
This question is most clearly illustrated through the
discrepancies between Tony’s initial memories and what he
remembers in retrospect of the discovery he makes.
The letter is evidence that Tony’s memories, which until
now he believed to capture a factual representation of his
past, are in fact unreliable, modified and often entirely
inaccurate.

11. To sum up
● Clearly, The Sense of an Ending is a novel which
raises more questions than it answers.
● However, it leaves the reader with an underlying
sentiment: that memory is fluid, unreliable and
susceptible to change.

12. ● The protagonist slowly engages with the
realisation that has fabricated and constructed
his own past.
● Evidently, Barnes provides a narrative which
comments on the instability of memory, and
Tony’s retrospective narration exemplifies that
memories can be repressed, distorted and
inaccurate. Thus, the reader is invited to
examine to what extent we unconsciously revise
the narrative of our own lives.

13. Thank you…

14. References
● Barnes, J. (2012). The Sense of an Ending. London: Vintage.
● Piqueras, M. (2014). Memory Revisited in Julian Barnes’s The Sense
of an Ending. Coolabah, 13(1), pp.87–95.
● Holmes, F. (2015). Divided Narratives, Unreliable Narrators, and the
Sense of an Ending: Julian Barnes, Frank Kermode, and Ford Madox
Ford. Papers on Language & Literature, 51(7), pp.27–50.