Volume-XI, Issue-III, May 2025 |
Analyzing the idea of Post-truth in Julian Barnes’s The Sense of an Ending Dr Abhishek Kumar, Assistant Professor (Guest), Department of Applied Science & Humanities, Nalanda, College of Engineering, Chandi, Nalanda, Bihar, India |
Received: 14.05.2025 | Accepted: 18.05.2025 | Published Online: 31.05.2025 | Page No: 426-436 | ||||
DOI: 10.29032/ijhsss.vol.11.issue.03W.042 | |||||||
ABSTRACT | ||
Historically, humanity has consistently sought to understand the nature of reality and truth, their formation, and methods of verification, leading to extensive discourse among scholars across several disciplines, including sociology, psychology, history, and literature. Consequently, the most recent perspective proposed and articulated by postmodernists as an assertion, the assertion, endorsed by new historicists, that reality or truth is constructed through memory and cannot be confined to a singular, immutable fact, constitutes the foundation of this research, aiming to illuminate the essence of reality or truth from a literary perspective (Bradley, 2011, p. 387). This claim is fundamentally personal and adaptable, shaped by several interpretations from various perspectives that may fluctuate depending on the context (Lansdown, 2017, p.38). In this context, Julian Barnes's The Sense of an Ending (2011), structured as a 'vollendungsroman,' serves as a direct rebuttal to postmodernists and new historicists who assert the unreliability and inaccessibility of reality/truth, positing that pure truth is nonexistent. By depicting his character Tony Webster in a highly realistic manner, who is ensnared in his present due to his fallible memories of the past, Barnes allows readers to evaluate the reliability and accessibility of reality/truth as influenced by memory, leading to the profound realization that objective reality/truth cannot be derived from memories. Ultimately, reality or truth derived from recollections might mislead an individual in their present or future actions, akin to the character Tony Webster. Keywords: Postmodernism, Reality, Unreliability, History, Memory, Post-truth |