On The Dynamic Change Of The Narrator’s Unreliability In Julian Barnes’ The Sense Of An Ending

Julian Barnes, a sixty-seven-year-old British author, whose eleventh novel TheSense of an Ending eventually helped him win the Man Booker Prize in November2011, is regarded as one of the “Three Giants of Contemporary British LiteratureCircle”. As soon as the novel was released, a rustle was caused in the literary worldand scholars and critics highly praised the depth of the book.The present thesis is intended to conduct an analysis of the unreliability ofnarrator and its dynamic change in the novel. To achieve this aim, the theory ofunreliable narrator proposed by Wayne C. Booth and James Phelan is applied, sincethe two pioneers are instrumental in enlightening the thrust of the research. The thesisstarts with an introduction to Julian Barnes and various comments on The Sense of anEnding; and the thesis proceeds to Booth and Phelan’s theory of unreliable narrator inChapter Two. Chapter Three evaluates the degree of the narrator’s reliability byanalyzing the implied author and the narrator in Booth’s theory; Chapter Four presentsan analysis of the narrator’s unreliability with Phelan’s theory of three axes, findingthat the narrator undergoes a dynamic change with the progression of the narrative;Chapter Five probes the major reasons of that dynamic change. The thesis ends with aconclusion that in the reminiscence of his youth in the first section of the novel, thenarrator is unreliable, but in the second part, the inserted depiction of his current life,the regained fragments of his memory, and the reevaluation of himself to some extentdeconstruct the previous unreliability, thus making his narration fluctuate fromcomplete unreliability to partial unreliability and then to full reliability.Through analyzing The Sense of an Ending from the perspective of unreliablenarrator, the present study attempts to provide an experimental approach to theinterpretation of the novel. Furthermore, by composing this thesis, the writer hopes tocontribute to the promotion of Julian Barnes and his works in China.