Memory has always played an important role in flash-back narratives. In an unreliable discourse, the reader's attention is intentionally drawn away from the story itself, since in postmodernism, the concepts of truth, history, and grand narrative 1 Assist.
In The Sense of an Ending, Barnes thoroughly explores the depths of unreliable narrator through the main character who comes to a point of re-evaluating and simultaneously rewriting about suicide of his childhood friend and his own role as the one who inherited Tony's diary after his death. Focusing on Freudian psychoanalytic interpretations of reconstruction of selfhood through mending the memory, the main character's narrative of The Sense of an Ending will be scrutinized through this study. 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. He 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. Julian Barnes, as a postmodernist author, was constantly involved in questioning the concepts of history, memory, and truth. It was the modernist and post-modernist authors who added new dimensions to the long-existed term 'unreliable narrator'. In the last two parts, through references to several French thinkers, the author of the article demonstrates that the bone of contention, that is, what in the end the reader finds out to be the narrator's son, is a form of (in Derrida's terminology) différance, in other words an incomplete identity created by means of the narrator's identification. This is probably because the narrator is being untruthful to himself as well, in order not to feel guilty for a misdeed he committed during his youth. On the contrary, in the second part of the present essay the author tries to give meaning to the reported story, not through what the narrator says, but through a few proofs scattered all over the novel which demonstrate that even the finale is in essence a lie or, at least, only a partial truth. As it is said in the first part of this article, though, the tendency of the critics so far has been that of trusting the narrator himself in the last confession he makes at the end of his recounting.
Julian Barnes’ successful novel The Sense of an Ending has been generating diverse interpretations, as it is told by a completely unreliable narrator.
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