A Study of Memory and Psychological Defense Mechanism in Julian Barnes’s The Sense of an Ending

Hossein Aliakbari Harehdasht,Zahra Ekbatäni

doi:10.32996/ijllt.2019.2.4.28

Abstract

In The Sense of an Ending, Julian Barnes portrays the mysterious workings of the human mind as it distorts facts towards the end of a self-image that one can live with. The protagonist in the novel deploys certain psychological defense mechanisms in order to protect himself from feelings of anxiety, only to experience even more profound anxiety due to his excessive use of them. The significance of the present paper lies in its novel view of the book. So far, the critique on the novel has mainly been focused on the workings of time on memory; however, the present paper investigates how psychological defense mechanisms blur the protagonist’s perception of reality and distort his memories. This paper also attempts to attract scholarly interest in the study of psychological defense mechanisms in the study of The Sense of an Ending which has so far been to the best of our knowledge overlooked

Highlights

The Sense of an Ending, which is divided into two parts, portrays a man in his sixties who is remembering or rather, constructing memories from his youth in the first part, and deconstructing the very same memories in the second part
The critique on the novel has mainly been focused on the workings of time on memory; the present paper investigates how psychological defense mechanisms blur the protagonist’s perception of reality and distort his memories
Here are some sources we have found useful: Liesl Schillinger (2011) in The New York Times points to a kind of social awkwardness present in The Sense of an Ending which is present in a good number of other British works of fiction (“Julian Barnes and the Emotions of Englishmen”)

Summary

Introduction

The Sense of an Ending, which is divided into two parts, portrays a man in his sixties who is remembering or rather, constructing memories from his youth in the first part, and deconstructing the very same memories in the second part. Through his unreliable narrator, Julian Barnes (2011) poses questions regarding imperfections of memory and self-delusion. Psychological defense mechanisms protect the individual from unwanted emotions which threaten the individual’s well-being They “allow individuals to reduce cognitive dissonance and to minimize sudden changes in internal and external environments” These mechanisms can be hazardous if an individual goes to extremes in applying them, in which case they downright distort his perception of reality

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