기억의 발굴과 역사적 책임감

The Excavation of Memory and Historical Responsibility in Julian Barnes' The Sense of an Ending

This paper aims to examine the link of an individual's past with the present and his/her responsibility toward the history in Julian Barnes' The Sense of an Ending. Telling the past to an audience, the narrator of The Sense of an Ending is tracking his memory and rebuilding his seemingly lost past. In the process, he excavates what he thought he has forgotten or he can't believe he has done. The past he retrieved does not remain as the past but affects his present life to be reconstructed. In addition, it leads him to see the current relationship with others and realize why he is responsible for others' as well as his life regardless of what he intended or not. As similar with Julian Barnes' other works, The Sense of an Ending deals with the boundary between the real and the imaginary, and what is believed true and what is true in the history. In this story, however, this comparison is done in an ordinary individual's history rather than in the big frame of world History. Therefore, it can be clearly seen how one's present is chained with his/her past and connected with others. It also illuminates the historical responsibility that every individual should take and leaves it to readers to find out the answer. The narrator explains what happened to him now and then, but he does not give exact answers or detailed information about what he wonders. Furthermore, he only tells his own view and tries to rationalize what he has done. Therefore, it should be examined on another level that he sincerely responds to his past and is ready to take the historical responsibility. This paper sees one's writing is a process of revisiting his past as well as finding himself. It first focuses on the narrator's certain memory that has been deleted or modified, which will help us to discover in what sense the narrator carried on that modification. Then it investigates how the revised past exerts an effect on his present and what the narrator's final definition of history and historical responsibility are.