Paper Details

In the age of post-truth, Julian Barnes’s "The Sense of an Ending" emerges as a prescient text interrogating the construction of personal and historical truth through memory. The novel’s protagonist, Tony Webster, reconstructs his past from fragmented, unreliable recollections, challenging the possibility of objective history. Barnes’s narrative blurs the lines between fact and interpretation, foregrounding how subjective experience and emotional filtering shape one’s understanding of past events. This paper explores the role of post-truth in personal memory and collective history as dramatized in the novel, drawing on contemporary theory and critical voices to analyze Barnes’s techniques. Through close reading, it unveils the interplay of memory, documentation, guilt, and narrative, revealing the protagonist’s shifting grasp of reality as emblematic of a larger historical epistemic uncertainty. The research engages with narratology, philosophy of history, and reader-response theory, analyzing how textual gaps, contradictory testimony, and self-deception parallel challenges in modern historiography. Barnes’s novel is positioned as both a case study and critique of post-truth culture, urging readers to question the veracity of their narratives and to contemplate the ethical stakes of historical self-construction.

post-truth, memory, historiography, unreliable narrator, subjective history