Politics of Memory in Julian Barnes‘s The Sense of an Ending

Abstract

This research project explores Julian Barnes’s The Sense of an Ending as a contextual document from the perspective of New Historicism. The narrator, Tony Webster narrates each and every event and related his memories and experiences in non-linear plot memoir. The self-reflexive narration by Tony is questioned by installing and subverting at the same time as which bears no objective presentations. For Tony, history is written by the survivors what they remember in the present. On this light, it is proved that Tony’s memory is imperfect and is not in chronological order. In this way, the choice of documentation is subjective and makes differences between the world of himself and reality which seeks the readers to read his each and every memories critically situated on the context of 1960s Britain. To read this text, new historicism has been used as a methodology, especially the concept of Louis Montrose and Michel Foucault as a tool, this research claims that Barnes’s The Sense of an Ending is a contextual document and an alternative history from the perspective of Tony that reflects the socio-economic and politico-cultural situation of Britain as well as the real scenarios of human relationship, marriage, separation, notion of family and friends after Post World War II, 1960s.