Time, Memory And Truth

The study on Julian Barnes in China began in 1990s. Barnes and His Flaubert’s Parrot (Foreign Literature Review,1997.2) by Professor Ruan Wei of Shenzhen University is the first research specifically studying on Barnes. Julian Barnes, with Ian McEwan and Martin Amis, is the three greatest writers in contemporary British literature. Having been nominated for the Booker Prize on three occasions, in 2011, Barnes finally won the prize for his then newest novel The Sense of an Ending. The Sense of an Ending, like a lot of Barnes’other works, deals with the theme about history and memory. Tony Webster is the narrator of the novel. The book is divided into two parts. The first part is Tony’s recalling of his own memories of his youth. The second part focuses on his present life and describes how his early memories are subverted.Time issue has always been an important topic in philosophical research. Henri Bergson, the famous French ethicist and philosopher, whose most important contribution on time issue is the introduction of philosophy of life, concludes the essence of the continuous creation of life itself to Duration. He also opposes the sense of mathematical sciences, in which time is a mechanical and linear concept. For his part, time is divided into physical time and psychological time, and the psychological time is the real time. The duration of time cannot be divided. People who divide the past, the present and the future will not get the truth of life. The nature of duration is the relationship between time and consciousness, the result of which is memory. Thus, memory is the product of duration. To reveal the effects of subjectivity of time on human beings, in this thesis, the core of Bergson’s life philosophy ---duration is used for interpretation of Barnes’ prize-winning novel The Sense of an Ending, connotations (instinct, intuition, life impulse) of which works in the main character’s concept of time.This thesis falls into five chapters. The first chapter is the introduction which consists of two aspects:the significance of the study and the structure of this thesis. Chapter 2 makes a literature review on The Sense of an Ending. It not only analyzes the studies at home and abroad, but also introduces the issue of time in diverse fields, which lays a foundation for the introduction of the theoretical Framework:Duration Theory. Chapter 3 and Chapter 4 are the main body of this thesis. Chapter 3 gives an analysis of time and memory in the book by discussing the time issue in the title and in the structure, the physical time and the psychological time, and also time and memory in the book, proving that The Sense of an Ending is totally a "time-haunted" book and testifies Bergson’s time division of physical time and psychological time in which the psychological time is the real time. Chapter 4 talks about time and truth in the novel by analyzing the characters’ time consciousness and reason they finally got or failed to get the truth. It proves Bergson’s Duration theory that time is a duration, in which the past, the present and the future cannot be divided, and only the person who combines them together may get the truth of life. Chapter 5 is the conclusion part of this thesis. It summarizes the significance of this study and also the innovations and limitations in this thesis. By providing some other new perspectives of study at last, this thesis may have certain reference for the future research.