Antihero In Julian Barnes’s The Sense Of An Ending

Julian Barnes is a prominent contemporary British writer.Together with Martin Amis and Ian McEwan,they are regarded as the three musketeers in British novelists.His Man Booker Prize winner The Sense of an Ending has received wide attention among critics ever since its publication in 2011.By sorting out the concept of antihero,this thesis,combining Horkheimer’s critical theory and Phelan’s theory of unreliable narration,has analyzed its antihero Tony Webster,thus disclosing the deconstruction of old system of values in the novel,namely the failure of reason,the unreliability of subject,and the limitation of knowledge.First,Horkheimer’s distinction of subjective and objective reason in his critical theory has been applied to analyze their respective representatives—Tony Webster and Adrian Finn.It should be pointed out that Tony is totally the incarnation of subjective reason,behaving in predilection and caring little about others.His life features failure and isolation from friends and families,which demonstrates the defeat of subjective reason.On the contrary,Adrian Finn led his entire life with reason and logic.He is also the one who was most likely to uncover the meaning of life and build a new system of values,but this possibility was quenched by the collusion of Tony and Mrs.Ford:Adrian was forced to commit suicide in order to complete his logic.His death echoes the dominance of subjective reason over the objective one and symbolizes the failure of reason as a whole.Second,with the help of Phelan’s theory of unreliable narration,the unreliable reporting and unreliable regarding of the antihero are pointed out.Through underreporting and misreporting,Tony depicted his ex-girlfriend Veronica as an arrogant and snobbish woman,thus exonerating him from his irresponsibility.Underregarding and misregarding occurred when Tony distorted the hospitality of the Fords into condescension so as to disguise his sense of inferiority;faced with evidences of the past,his self-rebukes were always superficial and concealed self-interest.Therefore,influenced by personal interest,the subject is not always able to observe the world rationally,objectively and impartially,thus refuting the objectivity of the subject in modern humanistic thoughts.Last but not least,the limited extent of knowledge and the unreliability of history revealed in the novel disintegrate the concept of knowledge in the traditional system of values,which believes knowledge to be scientific and objective,representing truth,historical justice and natural rules.The myths of Robson’s and Adrian’s death denote the limited extent that we can know,and the distortion of the narrator’s personal history as well as his distrust in the grand history highlights the unreliable nature of history.Through the creation of the antihero Tony Webster,Julian Barnes makes clear the crumble of old value system among contemporary westerners.Towards the end of the novel,Tony was left with turmoil of great unrest,which also reflects Barnes’s concern for the spiritual wasteland of contemporary western people.