Guest Post by Mary Tabor: Sense of an Ending—Reliability and Believability

a novel by Julian Barnes

Mary Tabor writes Only Connect …, helps writers in Write it! How to get Started and is a key contributor to the collaborative project Inner Life.

Reliability and believability 

Writers, who choose first person, face the question always of reliability. I discuss this here with a film, a book review and more. 

Sense of an Ending by Julian Barnes won the Man Booker Prize in 2011 and was made into a terrific film: 

The Sense of an Ending by Julian Barnes is a compelling, brief book of 163 pages that can be read in one sitting—how I read it. I found it to be un-put-down-able. Much of what has been said about it elsewhere focuses on the meaning of the ending. 

photo via Wikipedia 

Without a spoiler, I add this commentary: What Julian Barnes has magically created is a first-person narrator who questions his own reliability. All first-person narrators are subject to this accusation until they prove themselves otherwise—and indeed this one tries quite hard to establish his reliability. I argue he fails and that that’s Barnes’ subject: The question of the narrative we choose to tell ourselves. 

Some key passages illuminate this point of questioning history as fact and memory as reliable. Consider these quotes from the book: 

“If I can’t be sure of the actual events any more, I can at least be true to the impressions those facts left. That’s the best I can manage.” 

“I certainly believe we all suffer damage, one way or another. How could we not, except in a world of perfect parents, siblings, neighbours, companions? And then there is the question, on which so much depends, of how we react to the damage: whether we admit it or repress it, and how this affects our dealings with others. Some admit the damage, and try to mitigate it; some spend their lives trying to help others who are damaged; and then there are those whose main concern is to avoid further damage to themselves, at whatever cost. And those are the ones who are ruthless, and the ones to be careful of.” 

“History is that certainty produced at the point where the imperfections of memory meet the inadequacies of documentation.” 

“We live with such easy assumptions, don’t we? For instance, that memory equals events plus time. But it’s all much odder than this. Who was it said that memory is what we thought we’d forgotten? And it ought to be obvious to us that time doesn’t act as a fixative, rather as a solvent. But it’s not convenient—it’s not useful—to believe this; it doesn’t help us get on with our lives; so we ignore it.” 

“But time … how time first grounds us and then confounds us. We thought we were being mature when we were only being safe. We imagined we were being responsible but were only being cowardly. What we called realism turned out to be a way of avoiding things rather than facing them. Time … give us enough time and our best-supported decisions will seem wobbly, our certainties whimsical.” 

“How often do we tell our own life story? How often do we adjust, embellish, make sly cuts? And the longer life goes on, the fewer are those around to challenge our account, to remind us that our life is not our life, merely the story we have told about our life. Told to others, but—mainly—to ourselves.”

And thus we have a novel whose powerful subject is presented in its title: A Sense of an Ending. 

Thoughts for writers considering writing memoir, or simply, a story in first-person point of view: 

Leigh Gilmore, author of The Limits of Autobiography¹, notes “…[T]he number of new English language volumes categorized as ‘autobiography or memoir’ roughly tripled from the 1940s to the 1990s.”² 

She raises this key question about “reliability”: “How can you be sure of what you remember?”³ 

The question of reliability always becomes an issue for the reader when the narrator writes in 1st person. This happens with power and force when the reader views the story from a different distance than the teller. In good work, something should happen to the reader. In the unreliable tale, what happens is that the reader doesn’t believe the narrator. Consider the continuing controversy over Henry James’ The Turn of the Screw. Is the narrator reliable or not? 

My point here is that in first-person point of view, the question of believability and reliability both get raised. Here’s what I mean: The reader experiences distance from the character when the author creates a character who’s believable but whose judgments on the world the reader judges and doesn’t agree with. Such characters may, in fact, not change ostensibly. Instead the reader’s view of the character changes over the course of the telling. 

That explanation doesn’t fully serve my read of Julian Barnes’ novel Sense of an Ending. This narrator’s self-questioning is the strength and power of both the novel and the film. 

Stuff to think about, writers.