The Inexistent Truth

Julian Barnes is an outstanding writer. He won the Man Booker Prize for his fiction The Sense of an Ending in 2011, which is a great turning point in his writing life. Owing to his great success, he receives a lot of attention from the critics all around the world. The story is divided into two parts; The first part is about the protagonist’s school life, his friends and his unhappy relationship with his girlfriend. The second part concerns about his old age, at which he receives some money from his former girlfriend’s mother, which causes his great curiosity. When the protagonist looks back at his early life, he realizes that his memory is unreliable. He has to face the fault he causes.Unreliable narration is the most obvious feature of the novel; the unreliable narration is the core idea of Narratology. The first scholar who puts forward this concept is Booth; he classifies unreliable narration into two types:the axis of facts/event and the axis of evaluation. Later then, Booth’s student James Phelan develops his theory. On the basis of Booth’s classification of unreliability, Phelan adds the axis of knowledge/perception. This thesis studies the protagonist’s unreliable narration according to Phelan’s classification of unreliability, so as to study the novel from a new perspective. Memory is usually trusted in people’s recognition, while the story shows its uncertainty. Barnes reminds people of keeping their own thinking instead of trusting the memory totally.The thesis is made up of three chapters besides introduction and conclusion. Chapter two analyses the protagonist’s unreliable narration according to James Phelan’s classification of unreliability, revealing the fact that the protagonist is unreliable. Chapter three decodes the story, restoring the facts and then making the judgment of the protagonist, showing that memory can be affected by the emotion and the social discourse. Chapter four is the deconstruction of history which is based on the unreliability of both individual memory and collective memory. Barnes tells us that memory doesn’t present all the facts, the presentation of memory would cheat on us, the absolute truth doesn’t exist, but we can still go on exploring and we can only get close to the truth instead of touching it.