Out Of The Mist Of Self-Knowledge In The Sense Of An Ending

Julian Barnes (1946-) is a well-known British contemporary novelist, often known as "the Three Big British Writers" with Ian McEwan and Martin Amis. Since1980, he has created more than10fictions, including the novel Flaubert’s Parrot (1984) which established his position in the British literary scene. After three nominations of Booker Prize Shortlist, Barnes finally won the prestigious prize in2011with The Sense of an Ending. The novel mainly recounts the protagonist Tony’s journey of exploring his self-knowledge. Based on analysis of the protagonist’s life experience, the thesis tries to explore the difficulties of obtaining self-knowledge. In the novel, the narrator tries to construct his self-knowledge through narrative. However, due to his conscious awareness of the past, his arbitrary selection and modification of life stories make his narrative suspicious. In the first part of the novel, the narrator’s self-knowledge mainly depends on his personal memories and even his imagination. Through his narrative of the past, he creates a self-sufficient self-image with which he lives in complacency. In the second part of the novel, when the narrator unexpectedly receives the will from his former girlfriend’s mother, his self knowledge is challenged. His confusion and curiosity finally prompt him to re-establish contact with the people and events in the past and to re-construct a more objective self. This paper argues that, the act of self-narrative often deviates from the true self, due to the narrator’s subjective screening and tampering of the past experience and the limitation of narrative. Meanwhile, personal memory plays an important role in searching for self-knowledge, but because of the influence of emotions and reality, human memory can not accurately record every detail of life experience. Exploration of self-knowledge is derived from the needs of self-realization, which embodies people’ s search for meaning and significance in this world. In the novel, the narrator Tony is constantly digging in the depths of his memory, breaking the barriers and finally obtains a broad sense of himself.