Levels of Life by Julian Barnes

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

International Journal of Linguistics Literature & Translation ◽

10.32996/ijllt.2019.2.4.28 ◽

2019 ◽

Author(s):

Hossein Aliakbari Harehdasht ◽

Zahra Ekbatäni

Keyword(s):

Defense Mechanisms ◽

Defense Mechanism ◽

Human Mind ◽

The Novel ◽

Psychological Defense ◽

Julian Barnes ◽

Self Image

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

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Flaubert’s Parrot by Julian Barnes: Unreliable Narrators and Critical Reading

The British and American Language and Literature Association of Korea ◽

10.21297/ballak.2020.138.1 ◽

2020 ◽

pp. 1-18

Author(s):

Younghee Kim

Keyword(s):

Critical Reading ◽

Julian Barnes

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Discrepant Solace

10.1093/oso/9780198789758.001.0001 ◽

2019 ◽

Cited By ~ 1

Author(s):

David James

Keyword(s):

Literary History ◽

Doris Lessing ◽

Kazuo Ishiguro ◽

Joan Didion ◽

Julian Barnes ◽

Ethical Implications ◽

History Of ◽

Late Twentieth ◽

Ian Mcewan ◽

Affective Meanings

Consolation has always played an uncomfortable part in the literary history of loss. But in recent decades its affective meanings and ethical implications have been recast by narratives that appear to foil solace altogether. Illuminating this striking archive, Discrepant Solace considers writers who engage with consolation not as an aesthetic salve but as an enduring problematic for late twentieth- and twenty-first-century fiction and memoir. Making close readings of emotion crucial to understanding literature’s work in the precarious present, David James examines writers who are rarely considered in conversation, including Sonali Deraniyagala, Colson Whitehead, Cormac McCarthy, W.G. Sebald, Doris Lessing, Joan Didion, J. M. Coetzee, Marilynne Robinson, Julian Barnes, Helen Macdonald, Ian McEwan, Colm Tóibín, Kazuo Ishiguro, Denise Riley, and David Grossman. These figures overturn critical suppositions about consolation’s kinship with ideological complaisance or dubious distraction, producing unsettling perceptions of solace that shape the formal and political contours of their writing.

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