Self-Justifying Narrative in Julian Barnes’ The Sense of an Ending

Abstract

Although the term ‘unreliable narrator’ has long existed, it was the modernist and post-modernist authors who added new dimensions to it. Julian Barnes, as a postmodernist author, was constantly involved in questioning the concepts of history and truth and formed a new mode of an unreliable narrator who has an ability to deceive the reader, consciously or unconsciously, by suggesting different alternatives of his past actions as a means of self-justification. Tracing the idea of self-preservation, this paper aims at following the main character of The Sense of an Ending (2011) to find how the narrator misleads the reader through the course of the story to self-justify his past actions as a new way of creating an unreliable narrator. The paper will focus on Freudian psychoanalytic interpretations of the main character’s narrative.