Abstract
Julian Barnes is famous in contemporary literary world. His works have attracted many readers all over the world for his variety of writing style and his unceasing exploration of the truth of history and memory. As the Man Booker Prize winning novel in 2011, <i>The Sense of an Ending</i> mainly tells the story of the protagonist Tony Webster’s love relationship with Veronica Ford and his friendship with Adrian Finn through recalling the past. Taking the changing relationship among Tony, Veronica and Adrian as the main line, this paper mainly analyzes the different interpretive, ethical and aesthetic judgments and re-judgments made by Tony, the protagonist and the first person narrator, and the reader on the love and friendship in the novel in the light of James Phelan’s theory of narrative judgments. Through analysis, this paper shows the organic connections between the three types of narrative judgments, which not only promotes the narrative progression of the novel, but also realizes the perfect integration of the novel in narrative form, narrative ethics and narrative aesthetics. This process shows Barnes’ doubts about the reliability of human memory, which provides a better way for readers to understand the novel and appreciate Barnes’ superb narrative art.
Highlights
Julian Barnes and The Sense of an EndingJulian Barnes (1946-) is one of the most important British writers in contemporary literary world
This paper shows the organic connections between the three types of narrative judgments, which promotes the narrative progression of the novel, and realizes the perfect integration of the novel in narrative form, narrative ethics and narrative aesthetics
According to the literature review, it can be seen that as an award-winning novel, The Sense of an Ending has been studied by many scholars from different perspectives in the past ten years
Summary
Julian Barnes (1946-) is one of the most important British writers in contemporary literary world. In 1983, Barnes “was selected by the Book Marketing Council as one of the twenty ‘Best of Young British Novelists’, a list that includes Martin Aims, Pat Barker...Graham Swift” [1] Since he has won numerous literary awards such as Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize (1985), Gutenberg Prize (1987), and Austrian State Prize for European Literature (2004). Taking Barnes’s works as a whole, it is impossible to define the typical style of his writings because he refuses to follow the traditional novels’ arrangement of plot and the rules of portraying characters. Salient features of his novels are the diversity of topics and writing techniques. Stella Rimington, the head judge of the Man Booker Prize, described the novel as “exquisitely written, subtly plotted and reveals new depths with each reading” [3]
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