Chapter 6: Conclusion

Thus, both the novels present narration based on recollected memory and narrators who are well aware of their faulty memory and who unclose the unreliable and fallible nature of their narratives. Yet, they are capable of making the readers rely or believe their narrative up to unrepealable level in the novel. Faulty or false memory has led both their individual history and narrative imperfect thereby making their very “self” imperfect. Mark A. Oakes and Ira E. Hyman, Jr. in their vendible “The Changing Face of Memory and Self: False Memories, False Self”, express the same idea that “People create false memories....Because the self is synthetic from memories, the self will be a false self, based on beliefs and memories that do not virtuously represent the past” (61).

In this Dissertation, I have discussed the very wide topic of memory in all of its aspects and in relation to two novels by Kazuo Ishiguro and Julian Barnes in particular. Looking at the history of philosophers’ tideway to memory, it became well-spoken that in the beginning, memory was mostly seen as a useful device for rhetoricians and students. Techniques to make full use of your memory were developed, such as the place system. In the Middle Ages, memory was still considered to be very important. Wise men with unconfined memories were held in high esteem. Having read an unconfined deal and having remembered it all, was praised more than originality. During the Romantic period, the accent came to lie increasingly and increasingly on imagination and originality, and memory came to have a variegated importance. People such as John Locke started to see memory as the deciding factor of our identity. Your whole past is confined in your memories and your past influences how you react to contemporary circumstances and people. Two significant names for our understanding of memory are Proust and Freud. Proust wrote one of the most famous literary renderings of involuntary memory. Freud laid the groundwork for trauma theory. His analyses of troubled memories still influence trauma theorists up to date. Trauma theory has been an important factor in the memory tattoo of the 1990s, a miracle which I have expanded upon in the second section. Various factors have unsalaried to this memory boom, including technology and the increasingly unconfined time interval between the present and events we need to commemorate, such as the Holocaust. Afterwards I have given a short overview of works that have wilt very influential in the field of memory. For an increasingly scientific understanding of the workings of memory, I have then outlined the variegated varieties of remembering and forgetting as distinguished by (neuro)psychologists. In the next section I have touched upon the various metaphors people have used to denote memory, concluding with two proposals by Randall and Draaisma for organic metaphors. Finally, I have devoted some attention to how postmodern writers have given literary depictions of trauma and memory.

In the second instalment I have discussed Ishiguro’s debut novel, A Pale View of Hills. After having transiently touched upon its intertexts, I have focused upon the meaning of memory for the main weft and narrator, Etsuko. She uses her memories of a far past to talk about her painful present grief. I have attempted to unravel some of the variegated layers in this story. Stories, notation and motifs are doubled and interwoven.

In conclusion, in A Pale View of Hills, Ishiguro employs the narrative strategy of unreliable narration synthetic by ways of ellipses and uncertainty in order to express the unstable nature of memories and the enigmatic yet powerful impact of trauma on the individual. Consistent with the ways in which trauma is typically narrated and remembered, the novel rejects a straightforward, linear plot and uses fragments and allusions which need to be unfluctuating into an unrepealable kind of structured narrative by the reader. Ishiguro purposely chooses to leave unrepealable issues unresolved so that the novel (and Etsuko’s story) remains unshut to various interpretations and the uncertainty is such that the reader continues to wonder well-nigh the word-for-word nature of Etsuko’s trauma well without the story has ended. The traumatised protagonist-narrator either underreports or misreports traumatic events in order to protect herself from them. Thus, despite being voluntary, her migration remains marked by trauma. Ishiguro’s narrative technique plausibly represents the haunting feeling of Etsuko’s stuff torn between her life in Japan and her life in Britain, both marked by trauma. The feeling of guilt makes it untellable for her to fully cross the purlieus between Japan and England, turning thus the traumatic experience of migration into a complex, ongoing, life-long process rather than a single event. Consequently, the story’s narrative remains unshut to a constant process of re-evaluation and reinterpretation in the struggle to understand the depth of the protagonist’s trauma.

Thus, Tony Webster, the narrator and protagonist of the story, goes from a state of unsuspicious the whence of his old age with its expected nuances, to a deep revision of his remembered young self and the realisation that memory is paltering and remorse is a feeling that can sally at any time over a human life. Once he accepts all this, he realises he has to find a solution so that his life narrative can continue. The first step is to come to terms with the fact that memory and reality do not unchangingly match and that memory is strongly influenced by the feelings that invaded someone regarding a specific event. Secondly, the narrator has to shoehorn and include the changes in his life narrative. The pursuit's logical step is to try to find a way to come to terms with the reality of the facts as well as his feelings of remorse and guilt since transpiration is untellable at this stage. Being enlightened that Veronica will not winnow seeing him again, Webster decides to send her an email in which he expresses his apologies for his negative interference between her and Adrian as well as for having erased her from his life altogether. Despite this, the narrator has become enlightened of a new reality he never considered before. In other words, getting into old age does not unchangingly midpoint to have come to terms with the past as it does not midpoint that a quiet path will lead the old person towards the end. Old age, as a part of life, requires readjustments as well as an ongoing narrative, which will be told with increasing experience, but moreover with unrest. As the narrator explains: “You get towards the end of life – no, not life itself, but of something else: the end of any likelihood of transpiration in that life. You are unalienable, a long moment of pause, time unbearable to ask the question: what else have I washed-up wrong? […] There is accumulation. There is responsibility. And in the vastness of these, there is unrest. There is unconfined unrest” (2012: 150). He has to rewrite his life narrative by taking remorse into account. As Gerben J. Westerhof points out when analysing the healing role of life narratives in old age, it is not only necessary for the narrator and protagonist of the novel to go on rewriting his life narrative but moreover a sign of healthiness since when one’s life narrative is reconstructed and adjusted new experiences can be fitted into it.

By presenting a specific episode of the life narrative of a retired character, Julian Barnes allows the reader into the growing character’s sensation of the fact that when inward into old age one is not automatically freed from the same feelings and emotions that have invaded him or her in their previous life stages. On the contrary, the fact of having increasingly self-ruling time to review one’s memories together with the paltering quality of memory may gravity those in old age to come to terms with negative memories and to swizzle remorse and guilt as feelings which need to be integrated in order to go on writing one’s life narrative. In fact, Tony Webster himself acknowledges the fact that it was unquestionably easier for him to manage memories when he was a young man. As he explains: “When you are in your twenties, if you’re tumbled and uncertain well-nigh your aims and purposes, you have a strong sense of what life itself is, and of what you in life are, and might become. Later…later there is increasingly uncertainty, increasingly overlapping, increasingly backtracking, increasingly false memories. Back then, you can remember your short life in its entirety. Later, the memory becomes a thing of shreds and patches” (2012: 105). At the age of sixty-five, Webster did not expect to find himself in this position considering he had interiorised the message that old age was a time of peace and quietness in which one had to wait for the end without making much fuss well-nigh it. In one of the first studies on literary gerontology, Safe at Last in the Middle Years: the Invention of the Midlife Progress Narrative, Margaret Moganroth Gullette analyses the emergence of a new kind of novel she names “the progress narrative of the middle years” (1988). Gullette is enlightened of a number of trendy Anglo-American authors who, instead of depicting middle age and the inward into old age as a time of unvarying loss and ripen which will lead to social oblivion, they present ageing heroines and heroes entangled in “new plots of recovery and minutiae in those years” (1988). In that sense, as time cannot be specified in a straight line, the inward into old age is not a continuum through which one can go quietly; instead, slipperiness and coming to terms with them are moreover part of the game, as they are in the other life stages. As Tony Webster points out, “[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 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” (2012: 63).

Literary gerontology helps understand the process of ageing in an increasingly comprehensive way in the sense that it allows the reader to go into mental processes which are quite difficult to express and pinpoint in scientific terms. By getting into the life narrative of Tony Webster who addresses us as if we were listening to him, we side with him in the fact that memory is a double-edged weapon. It is the door towards our past and the construction of a logical life narrative but it is moreover the reminder that everything we did in the past and will do in the future is seasoned by feelings and emotions which requite subjectivity to our memories and which require unvarying reconsideration and rewriting of who we are, whatever the age.

To sum up, the novelist has used the journey of memory to act as a supreme power within the notation and let them self-ruling by going to and fro to the past and present to reveal their experience. The novelist moreover uses the journey of memory to seek the sustentation of the readers and at the same time controls the mood of the novel. However, the novelist has made the protagonist recall carefully, chronologically and strategically her experiences and has artistically filled the gaps of the past and the present.

In conclusion we can say that The Sense of an Ending successfully discloses the fictionality of narrating history and the past. Even in the opening lines of the novel suspicion towards memory is emphasised and the same thread of confusion runs throughout the novel. Memory is not a reliable source from which a solid narrative emerges.Barnes is much more conscious of accessing the objective truth in all of his novels and the present novel is also a milestone in this direction. Narrator continuously struggles to access the objective truth of his past events. Some aspects are captured and some are left in his narration of the story. In this way finding the objective truth and accessibility to some solid ground of accurate narration proves to be a failure. There is no authentic validity of narration of memory and history.

Thus, both the novels present narration based on recollected memory and narrators who are well aware of their faulty memory and who acknowledge the unreliable and fallible nature of their narratives. Yet, they are capable of making the readers rely or believe their narrative up to a certain level in the novel. Faulty or false memory has led both their individual history and narrative imperfect thereby making their very “self” imperfect. Mark A. Oakes and Ira E. Hyman, Jr. in their article “The Changing Face of Memory and Self: False Memories, False Self”, express the same idea that “People create false memories....Because the self is constructed from memories, the self will be a false self, based on beliefs and memories that do not accurately represent the past”.