Frustrated Entitlements and Micro-Aggressors in Julian Barnes’s Novels, The Sense of an Ending and The Only Story

This article reads the male first-person narrators of Julian Barnes’s The Sense of an Ending and The Only Story as gender microaggressors. Focusing on microaggression developed in social and feminist psychology, and on contemporary feminist philosophy’s redescription of misogyny, the article argues that the rueful, self-critical retrospection these novels are usually praised for also serves as a vehicle for the quiet reproduction of patriarchal ideology. At the root of these microaggressions lies what the article terms ‘frustrated entitlement’, the felt grievance of someone who believes a tribute has gone unpaid. Feminist narratology supplies the analytic tools required to make this argument precise. Close reading distinguishes microaggressions performed by the younger protagonist within the storyworld from those enacted by the older narrator in the telling, and shows that both are absorbed into a rhetorical structure of ‘bonding unreliability’: the narrators name the gendered patterns of their own thought, and that very naming becomes the licence by which the patterns are kept in place. Set against the louder retrosexism of the postwar British male confessional novel in its more satirical and self-aggrandising mode, Barnes’s decorous, retrospectively contrite narrators emerge as the most refined instance of an underexamined formal investment in contemporary British letters: the patient maintenance of patriarchal continuity through the voice of the man who is sorry.