Moving through time exploring memory in select fiction of Julian Barnes

Abstract

The thesis examines five novels Before She Met (1982), Talking It Over (1991) Love, etc(2000), The Sense of an Ending ( 2011) and The Only Story (2018) by Julian Barnes tounderstand how memory has been expressed in the said works. The thesis investigates howBarnes employs personal memory as a primary lens through which his characters constructand reconstruct their identities. By weaving together fragmented recollections and subjectiveperspectives, Barnes creates a space where the instability of memory becomes central to thereader's understanding of character and meaning. The study also examines memory'sinherently selective, distorted and reconstructive nature. The author employs differentnarrative techniques which affect the representation and reliability of memory which thestudy proposes to investigate. Time and temporality often function as living presences in thesenovels. Barnes’s narrative strategies, nonlinear storytelling, shifting perspectives, and therecursive movement between past and present have also been studied. The author’s sustainedinterest in the relationship between time and memory is also analyzed showing how memoryboth operates within time and transcends it through acts of reinterpretation. Barnes positionstime as both an active agent and also a distorting force that reshapes character and erodes thecertainty of the remembered past. The relationship between time and memory throughdifferent narrative perspectives is also explored. It has also been examined how differentnarrative voices affect the temporal structures within the selected novels. One of the keyareas of exploration also involves an examination of how the novels address the concept ofunreliability in relation to memory. The thesis fills a critical gap in existing scholarship,which has largely examined his fiction through the lens of postmodernism without sustainedattention to memory principle of his narrative art.