The Evils of Banality: Shallowness, Self-Realization, and Closure in Julian Barnes’s The Sense of an Ending and Oscar Wilde’s De Profundis

TLDR: The authors examined the literary-philosophical functions of shallowness and self-realization (particularly vis-a-vis memory) in Julian Barnes's The Sense of an Ending and Wilde's De Profundis.

Abstract: This article examines the literary-philosophical functions of shallowness and self-realization (particularly vis-a-vis memory) in Julian Barnes’s The Sense of an Ending and Wilde’s De Profundis. Beginning with a comparative reading of Barnes’s novel and Kermode’s critical classic of the same name, it shows how Barnes’s narrator’s need for Kermodian “concord fictions” causes him to distort and misremember his own past, making it shallower and more banal than it truly was. Engaging earlier critical literature on the novel, the article also reads Wilde’s De Profundis (and Bosie’s responses to it) as “nonfiction” counterparts to the project of Barnes’s narrator. Wilde’s own narrative self-realization is cited as a positive counterexample, while Douglas’s Autobiography offers a sharp negative contrast. Reading Barnes’s narrator Tony as falling between these extremes, the article ends by reflecting on the reconstruction of the past (and strange figuration of “the narrative present”) that the novel’s clo...