A Neurotic Narrator in Julian Barnes’ The Sense of an Ending: Time You Wear on the Inside of Your Wrist

Abstract

This essay endeavours to read Tony in The Sense of an Ending as an unreliable narrator, and that his incredible recount is due to his neurosis. This pathological neurosis instigates his fantasy, which distorts his understanding of reality. Moreover, his fantasy-embedded mumbling communication blurs his points into unreliability. What results is his deteriorating moral sense, out of which he ends up damaging the people he knows, such as Veronica, Adrian and, to an unnecessary degree, Adrian junior, who lost his young father when he was an infant. This essay’s analytical reading thus focuses on how the novel’s whole sequence unfolds in a scheme that Tony intentionally and unintentionally sets up to mangle the life of others. In the bottom line, his lackadaisical and peace of mind-seeking attitude makes him an inconsiderate character of neurosis that Iris Murdoch abhors as an enemy of love. In the course of analysing Tony’s solipsistic narration, this essay uses Murdoch’s longstanding idea of neurosis and its subsequent solipsistic interpretation of the world, stemming from her notion of fantasy in opposition to the imagination that Murdoch expounds in different writings. This essay argues that Barnes’ novel is an illustration of Murdoch’s idea of neurosis based on the analytical ground that according to the author’s device Tony and his school friends wear a watch on the inside of their wrists, which indicates a predetermination towards understanding events subjectively. This essay takes this tendency as a rationale to employ a Murdochian reading of neurosis, fantasy and solipsism.