The Ageing Confessor and the Young Villain: Shadowy Encounters of a Mirrored Self in Julian Barnes’s The Sense of an Ending

Confessional fiction is a literary genre revolving around the self-splitting of the main character. As a penitent narrator of the story, he talks about one or more episodes in his past in which his evil, immoral or wicked behaviour have blotched his conscience. Consequently, his story-telling, formulated in the shape of a confession has the purpose of cleaning his dirty conscience of his sins. Julian Barnes’s 2011 Man Booker Prize winning novel A Sense of an Ending has a structure insisting on a two-layered storyline with the narrator Tony Webster telling an indistinct narratee the story of his past when an oddly triangular love-affair entangled his girl-friend Veronica Ford, his best friend Adrian Finn and himself. After a few episodes, Adrian commits suicide and forty years later, on discovering his possible involvement, Tony starts feeling guilty. Paradoxically, therefore, Tony the narrator is not also Tony the character: as a speaker in the fiction he evaluates, meditates and judges all his actions in the past, in the same way as a magistrate would in a trial. However, he is also an unreliable narrator who is prone to editing his memories in such a way as to avoid hurting his immodest pride, and whether or not the reader should rely on his story-telling becomes the greatest fascination in this novel. In my paper I mean to analyse the ways in which this fiction continuously steps in and out of the traditional boundaries of this literary genre, playing with its normative elements in order to demonstrate that instead of using the typical narration mode of a confession, Tony Webster creates an artful parody of it. Far from exposing his guilty conscience, he in fact cunningly tailors a story satisfying his own sense of revenge in response to the wrong received in the past. I will also try to demonstrate how the narrator’s ambivalent feelings against his former friend actually bring to the surface the complex relationship of the protagonist with his double. In order to prove my theory, I intend to adopt the theoretical frame of postmodern literature, in particular Linda Hutcheon’s enquiry on parodic uses made in contemporary fiction, and Michel Foucault’s analysis of the politics of narration in a confessional narration. In addition, it will be particularly intriguing to analyse the ways in which the notion of the sense of guilt in a confessional fiction overlaps with the contradictory connection between soul and double. To my knowledge, while many scholars have discussed themes analogous to those I intend to analyse, no specific research on this literary work has been engaged from the point of view of a confessional fiction.