Memory, Identity and Old Age: The Sense of an Ending as the Story of Ageing

Abstract

The Sense of an Ending (2011) by Julian Barnes touches upon many issues such as gender, class, sexuality, death, and memory. It particularly underlines how our memories can be misleading and thus create false images of ourselves as well as of the people around us. One of the subjects dealt with in the novel is the process of ageing. Barnes does not represent the period of senescence as the phase of decay and stagnancy. Rather, it is a new stage in one’s life when a new sense of the self is formed and new facets of life – either positive or negative – are (re)discovered. Beginning particularly with the 1970s, old people with complex and interesting personalities have become the focus of contemporary fiction. The increase in the number of elderly people, the developments in gerontology and the theories of ageing have contributed to the emergence of new literary genres such as midlife bildung, reifungsroman and vollendungsroman. The aim of this paper is to focus on the complexities of later life represented in The Sense of an Ending and analyse the novel considering the features of vollendungsroman, a term suggested by Constance Rooke to define “the novel of completion” or “winding up”.

Keywords

• Julian Barnes
• The Sense of an Ending
• Vollendungsroman
• ageing
• memory

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