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Thinking Activity on "The Sense of an Ending" by Julian Barnes

This blog is part of my academic activity. To know more about the task click here.

1) How do you understand memory and history with reference to your reading of this novel?

After reading this novel the understanding related to history and memory both has changed. I used to think about memory that it will at some extent forgotten but never distorted. After reading this novel I really feel that we also have that distorted memory, which we want to store as something which has actually not taken place. By doing that we are cheating our selves and others also. So memory and history both are connected. History is written from memory. Now we have seen in this novel how distorted memory can be stored by the individual. If historians take their statements into consideration, we can not trust history either. In the novel, Tony says history is not lies of victors or self-delusion of defeated, history is the memory of survivors. It is told by them who has not gone for a fight from either side and they have survived. They don’t even have first-hand experiences of the things. So these people will remember history in a different way. We can not trust them without any evidence. So we should not trust anything without evidence, not the person and not even history.

2. How do you understand memory and history with reference to your reading of this novel


Ans.  After reading the novel, we can say that memory and history are interrelated. I agree with the given definitions of history in the novel  that:

 'History is that certainty produced at the point where the imperfections of memory meet the inadequacies of documentation'.'History is the lies of the victors','History is the self-delusion of the defeated',  History isn't the lies of the victors, as I once glibly assured Old Joe Hunt; I know that now. It's more the memories of the survivors, most of whom are neither victorious nor defeated.

Hence, we can say that history is not that particular historian who is witness the historical event or it is not true that history written by victors, there are many histories of loser who defeated by victors. Memory is constructed by people in which they record what is a good memory for them. If we deconstruct or see-through multi-layers then we can't rely on any documented history because there can be an emotional attachment of the people in the documentary and also in this digital era written documentation can also be constructed or fake. so, accordingly to know the real documentation of the historical events we have to go in a deep process and cross check everything.

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