Assignment 13 - New Literatures

Department of English

Maharaja Krishnakumarsihnji Bhavnagar University

 

Written Assignment – Paper 13

Unreliable Narration in ‘The Sense of an Ending’

 

Name: Rohit Vyas

Semester 4

Roll No: 19

PG Enrolment Number: 2069108420200041

E-mail: rohitvyas277@gmail.com

Course: M.A. English (2019-21)

Paper 13 – New Literatures, Unit – 2

 

Introduction

 

The Sense of an Ending is a postmodern novel written by Julian Barnes in 2011. The book received The Man booker Prize in literature in the same year. The author Julian Barnes has written this novel keeping in mind of the young audience. It can be said that it’s a YA fiction – which stands for Young Adult fiction.

 

The title of the novel is taken from Frank Kermode’s book with the same name, The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction. It holds the detailed study of modern fiction and its contemporary usage in literature.

 

The novel is divided into two parts, ‘One’ and ‘Two’. It holds the sharpness of language with brevity. As if Barnes has enlivened the quote – “Brevity is the soul of wit”. The matter-of-fact writing style is one of the iconic of Barns’ writing styles. Apart from the positive critical reception of the novel, it also holds some drawbacks.

 

The novel sets up in the USA, where, three Science Sixth school friends, Tony Webster, Colin, and Alex make a promise for a life-long, friendship. The protagonist, Tony Webster recalls his memories of his meeting with Adrian Finn and his encounter with Veronica Ford.

 

However, the first-person narration of the novel seems very unreliable due to several reasons like first-hand tempering of the memory element, compromising the philosophical thoughts with past by the protagonist, so on and so forth.

 

Where it all begins…

 

It would be more agreeable to argue about the unreliability of the narration by first putting a quote:

 

... then the Last Judgment begins, & its Vision is Seen by the Imaginative Eye of Every one according to the situation he holds. – BLAKE

 

To elaborate the quote regarding the present novel, the notion of thinking about the characters and their context differs from reader to reader. Blake talks about the Last Judgment in a different context and the vision which is to be seen by the people at large is going to be very fictional and imaginative, a bit at length away from reality. So here, in this novel, how Tony is narrating the story of his past younger days is much unreliable.

 

To cite a few quotes from the original text, can prove the narrative technique on its own.

 

I remember, in no particular order (Barnes, 3)

 

The first initial line itself defines the unreliability of the narration; if the narrator doesn’t remember in any particular order, readers may raise doubts and questions about the forthcoming pages and events. But as a postmodern novel, it is open to interpretation and questions.

 

Positively looking at the unreliability of the narrative technique, one can presumably ponder a bit deeper in the arena of what T S Eliot has mentioned as The Theory of Depersonalization, in which the author has to remove the personal experiences and detach itself from the very content.

 

Here, a quote by Umberto Eco would be applicable:

 

"A narrator should not supply interpretations of his work; otherwise he would not have written a novel, which is a machine for generating interpretations."

— Umberto Eco, postscript to The Name of the Rose

 

Moreover to the quote, the novel has much more to do with autobiographical aspects, as it already seems. Tony Webster sometimes clarifies what he wants to say by tempering his memory by going in his past.

         

The use of negative sentences gives more weight to the unreliable tone. Here it goes as:

 

I’m not very interested in my schooldays, and don’t feel any nostalgia for them. But school is where it all began, so I need to return briefly to a few incidents that have grown into anecdotes, to some approximate memories which time has deformed into certainty. If I can’t be sure of the actual events any more, I can at least be true to the impressions those facts left. That’s the best I can manage. (Barnes, 4)

 

Readers’ dilemma…

        

         The novel begins with hyphens. As a postmodernist text, ‘The Sense of an Ending’ has an ample amount of hyphens to connect the dots between fragmented memories. There are some markers also that signify the loose cohesion between the first and the second part.

        

         Readers may get confused and mislead when they reach half way round the novel. The fragments of the memory are as follows.

 

         —a shiny inner wrist;

—steam rising from a wet sink as a hot frying pan is laughingly tossed into it; —gouts of sperm circling a plughole, before being sluiced down the full length of a tall house;

—a river rushing nonsensically upstream, its wave and wash lit by half a dozen chasing torchbeams;

—another river, broad and grey, the direction of its flow disguised by a stiff wind exciting the surface;

—bathwater long gone cold behind a locked door. (Barnes, 3)

 

Here are the markers where readers get confused. Secondly, the narration begins with a deep philosophical excerpt that lead the readers in time, space and its malleability. The questions are automatically answered in the trajectory of the narration but one has to refer to the first page again and again for connecting the dots.

 

Julian Barnes as a postmodern author, has aptly used the subjectivity for Tony Webster. Where Tony himself finds the memory very tempered at the age of sixty. He recalls the incident of meeting Veronica and her family at her home, and comes across the word ‘damage’. He questions himself:

 

What did I mean by “damage”? It was only a guess; I didn’t have any real evidence. But whenever I looked back on that unhappy weekend, I realised that it hadn’t been just a matter of a rather naïve young man finding himself ill at ease among a posher and more socially skilled family. (Barnes, 43)

 

When one does any work or task with utmost consciousness, one doesn’t need to clarify their decisions, actions and give justifications to anyone. If so happens it becomes shallow to discuss or further the story. But here the unreliability comes up when Tony elaborates the word ‘damage’:

 

When I wrote to Adrian, I wasn’t at all clear myself what I meant by “damage.” And most of a lifetime later, I am only slightly clearer. (Barnes, 43)

 

The Question of Accumulation

 

How could an individual conclude any of such unreliability when it comes on the table of the postmodern fiction? Though it’s agreeable that the modern angst leads to the generation of the anxious, autobiographical literature which possibly may hold some looseness in their prose but here the prose style is matter-of-fact yet it’s unreliable. As Adrian Finn points out several integers and makes some equations out of the real life experiences, one can possibly put an analogy of the accumulated points. But one has to be careful in making any opinions from the face value of anything.

 

'The falseness of an opinion is not ... any objection to it,' says Nietzsche, adding that the only relevant question is 'how far the opinion is life-furthering, life-preserving, species-preserving.' (Kermode, 50)

 

Here, we can conclude that the novel contains unreliable narration with unsuitable fragments that make some disposition in reader’s mind. Yet the novel stands as one of the milestones of the postmodern fiction. It suggests multiple interpretations to unfold and encourages readers to question the content, context, characters and narration.

 

 

Works Cited

 

Barnes, Julian. The Sense of an Ending. Vintage, 2011.

Fish, David. "Book Review: The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco." Medium, 16 May 2017, dsfish.medium.com/book-review-the-name-of-the-rose-by-umberto-eco-265be0c09e79.

Kermode, Frank. The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction with a New Epilogue. PDF, Oxford UP, USA, 2000.