Deceptive Re-narration and self-justifying narrative in Julian Barnes' the sense of an ending

It was the modernist and post-modernist authors who added new dimensions to the long-existed term 'unreliable narrator'. Julian Barnes, as a postmodernist author, was constantly involved in questioning the concepts of history, memory, and truth. He formed a new mode of an unreliable narrator who has an ability to deceive the reader, consciously or unconsciously, by suggesting different alternatives of his past actions as a means of self-justification. Tracing the idea of self-preservation, this paper aims at following the main character of The Sense of an Ending (2011) to find how the narrator misleads the reader through the course of the story to self-justify his past actions as a new way of creating an unreliable narrator. Focusing on Freudian psychoanalytic interpretations of reconstruction of selfhood through mending the memory, the main character's narrative of The Sense of an Ending will be scrutinized through this study. © 2019 Karadeniz Technical University. All rights reserved