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A contribution to: Echo

Edited by Hannah McIntyre and Hayley O'Kell

MHRA Working Papers in the Humanities 15

Modern Humanities Research Association

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Abstract.  Julian Barnes’s 2011 novel, The Sense of an Ending, begins with a carefully careless list of images that the narrator claims to remember ‘in no particular order’. As the novel progresses, these images are revealed to be significant for the narrator because he associates them with two events from his time at University: a failed relationship and the suicide of his close friend. By the end of the novel, however, it becomes clear that the narrator has falsely attributed significance to these memories and that — within a broader context — there were other moments which could have shed far more clarity on the events of the past. This article closely examines the narrator’s list of memories, in order to demonstrate that they are comparable to a sequence of echoes that reflect the plot of the novel. It argues that this process of echoing enables the reader to consider the distortive effects of memory, by emphasizing certain aspects of the story over others and thus altering the sequence of events, just as echoes distort sound. Through this line of reasoning, it draws upon the work of Peter Brooks and Roland Barthes to consider how memory acts as an echo chamber for the narrator, permitting him to use remembered events to create a false narrative which continually perpetuates itself, even when faced with contradictory evidence. The article goes on to argue that the beginning of the novel even exploits the reader’s own memory, forcing them to become complicit in the narrator’s echo chamber.

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