Alfred Nobel University Journal of Philology (May 2023)
THE IMAGE OF A MAN OF CATASTROPHE IN JULIAN BARNES’S NOVEL “THE SENSE OF AN ENDING”
Abstract
The article analyzes “The Sense of an Ending” by the English writer J. Barnes by using the novel’s key image of protagonist Tony Webster and the associated philosophical complex of problems of modern man’s existence in the world. This paper offers a working definition of the catastrophic consciousness concept, through the prism of which the characteristic and key features of post-nonclassical catastrophic era person are traced. The concept of a man of catastrophe means a person who is a generator and bearer of the catastrophe of one’s own life and soul. The philosophical basis for this article was the idea of the “anthropological catastrophe” by philosopher M. Mamardashvili, who sees it as the main danger to the existence of humanity. He assumes that the central factor of the anthropological catastrophe is the individual consciousness, which is unpredictable due to the tendency to (self)destruction and breakdowns of absolute civilizational mechanisms. The purpose of the article is to analyze the image of a man of catastrophe and the key components of protagonist Tony Webster’s catastrophic consciousness. To achieve the main aim, historical-cultural, historical-literary and hermeneutic research methods were involved. J. Barnes’s serious interest in the problems of modern man’s existence is constant, which is confirmed by all his early and recent novels (“England, England”, “The Noise of Time”, “The Only Story”, “Elizabeth Finch”). He sees them in the special difficulties that a person faces in the process of national and personal identification, in the awareness and acceptance of life’s path as a path of losses and continuous trials, in the understanding of the fragility and shakiness of human existence and interpersonal relations, in the impossibility of an adequate, objective understanding of himself and the world and the inevitable fact of the death presence in life of every person. J. Barnes’s novel “The Sense of an Ending» is another brilliant attempt to reproduce one of many variations of human life and think about the reasons for its capriciousness and tragedy. “The Sense of an Ending» is a sophisticated psychological novel that expresses the singularity of human experience and the uniqueness of people’s life destinies. The writer tells the story of a person or even several people unfolding several series of unconscious but tragic events, the catastrophic nature of which is understood by the protagonist only in old age, when the destruction of his life has become an obvious fact that cannot be hidden from and cannot be changed. Tony’s descent into the dark tunnels of his own memory and his past is difficult, but the hero seeks to understand what he did wrong in his life, where his “free fall” into the abyss began. Tony’s weak-mindedness and timidity, the desire to be a “non-conflict”» person make him vulnerable to the challenges he faces in the process of growing up and, most importantly, to his first love. For him, Veronica is the Other, in the relationship with whom he can feel his individuality, the value and strength of his originality and its inherent imperfections. As a result of the study, it was determined that the main traumatic factors, triggers and catalysts of the catastrophic worldview of the novel’s protagonist are memory, time and love, that reveal the weakness of mnemonic mechanisms and the unreliability of human memory, false apperception and the instability of the value system, internal disorder and person’s inability to adequate reflection and self-reflection. The consequence of such a state of the protagonist’s mind is his understanding of the loss of time, the irreparability of the past, the impossibility of change, the collapse of his life ideas and the fragility of human life, and the complete awareness that he alone was the root cause of all these troubles. A whole corpus of works of the turn of the 20th-21st centuries, written by British writers like M. Bradbury, J. Coe, M. Amis, I. McEwan, Gr. Swift and others, highlight the characteristic features of such a person with his specific reactions to external challenges and internal troubles, and this gives a reason to say that the literature models a typical image of a hero or anti-hero of the apocalyptic world, well recognized by contemporaries and relevant to the latest transitional era. Based on the peculiarities of the English cultural and literary tradition with its inherent preference for historical and ethical concreteness and acuteness of the sociomoral problems of the human existence, the appearance of the typical image of a man of catastrophe in the British postmodern novel looks organically, and such an artistic type requires further balanced literary research. J. Barnes also forms and adds this tendency and presents an own bright version of his contemporary, creating a striking portrait of a person of chaotic, disharmonious and dangerous times, a man who is lonely and exhausted by anxieties and troubles, a man who is torn by inner doubts, insecurity, mental crisis, desolation, and disappointment in the result of his life and depression. The extreme intensity of the hero’s inner experiences, the feeling of the fallibility of the past, the futility and uncertainty of the present and the future determines the core state of mind of a modern man of catastrophe, that exists in a world in which anthropological catastrophe has become an essential sign of everyday reality.
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