A New Historical Study Of The Sense Of An Ending

As "the Three Big British Writers" together with Martin Amis and Ian MacEwan, Julian Patrick Barnes (1946-) is considered as one of the most influential British writers in the 1980s. As a successful writer, Barnes has earned many an award, including the Man Booker Prize in 2011 for his magnum opus The Sense of an Ending. Being one of the representatives of the postmodern writers, Barnes owns the distinctive view on history and the pursuit of historicity and self identity runs through his novels, which gain him the honour of "near historian". Barnes’ view on history is perfectly harmony with that of the New Historicism. The New Historicism subverts the historical view of Historicism and gives a new interpretation of the relationship between the history and the text. The "self-fashioning" proposed by Stephen Greenblatt takes a fresh look at the self construction in historical texts.The Sense of an Ending, embodies Barnes’ focus on the self-fashioning of the protagonist Tony Webster. Through the contradictory retrospection in the two parts of the novel, Barnes intends to shed light on the uncertainty and multi-possibilities of the history and the uncertainty of the self in history as well. In the novel, the process of the elucidation of the protagonist’s past is also that of his self-fashioning. And the constant renovation and reconstruction of the history is the repeated subversion and refashioning of the self. The contradictoriness of the personal history results in the uncertainty of Tony’s self-fashioning. The power of writing history and discourse manipulates the value orientation of the historical events, and the personal elucidation of the history in the process of recording leads to the fiction of history, which are responsible for the contradictory and changeable self-fashioning in history.This thesis aims to give a New Historical study of the uncertainty of the protagonist Tony Webster’s self fashioning and explore the factors contributing to this uncertainty by taking the relationship between history and texts into account and thereby seek for a practicable way to fashion the true self of people in the long course of history.