The Sense Of An Ending:Self-construction Among Memories

Julian Barnes is known as one of the most preeminent novelists in contemporary Britain. His latest works, The Sense of an Ending published in 2011, won the Booker Prize. Barnes inherits and extends his writing--the research of history, memory and identity. The fiction consists of two parts. The first part focuses on the narrator's memory about his youthful time. Due to personal memory and subjective imagination, such as the arbitrary selection and modification of his youth memory, Tony constructs himself as a noble person, but he escapes from the real self and faces up to his past at ease. In the second part, because of a heritage from his ex-girlfriend's mother, Tony starts to feel puzzled about his former recognition, which urges him to recollect his past, reexamine himself, and approach a truer self.On the basis of the New Historicism, this thesis explores the protagonist's self-construction among his memories and then reveals the relationship between history, memory and identity construction. Firstly, this thesis explores the relationship between individual memory and identity. Based on distorting memories and selectively forgetting those important pieces, Tony constructs himself as an innocent victim and a faithful loyalist. Secondly, it analyzes Tony's deconstruction of his long established memory and identity. When Tony's memory clashes with others'memory, his memory is in danger of falling apart, so is his fabricated identity. At that time, he has to accept others'memories and recollect his lost memories which he has deliberately forgotten. Thirdly, it explores that Tony starts to have self-reflection and reexamine himself with the deconstruction and subversion of his previous memory; and then he starts to face up to his past critically, thank those people around him with grateful spirit and accept his truer self. Finally, in The Sense of an Ending, history, memory and identity are closely related. History is native to undergoers' memory which is changeable like a flowing river without stop. People would like to evaluate themselves and shape their identity on the basis of personal needs and woven memories, but the subjectivity of memory will cause an unstable, patched-up mess of memory in contrast with reality and in conflict with collective memory; subsequently, the identity based on it will be in danger of deconstruction; at that point, in accordance with others'memory, people need to constantly reexamine themselves, change themselves and finally construct their truer self.