The Only Story By Julian Barnes

 The Only Story by Julian Barnes: A Comprehensive Analysis

This blog post represents a comprehensive engagement with Julian Barnes's 2018 novel The Only Story, completed as part of a Flipped Learning Activity assigned by Dr. Dilip Barad. Rather than offering conventional interpretations, this analysis seeks to uncover the novel's hidden architectures its silences, its narrative gaps, and the ways it subverts our expectations about love, aging, and storytelling itself.

Introduction

Julian Barnes's The Only Story (2018) is a profound exploration of love, memory, and the consequences of our choices. The novel follows Paul, a 19-year-old who falls in love with Susan Macleod, a married woman 29 years his senior, at a suburban tennis club in the 1960s. Through Barnes's masterful narrative techniques and thematic complexity, the novel opens with what appears to be a simple question but is actually a philosophical trap: "Would you rather love more and suffer more, or love less and suffer less?" Yet by the end, we realize this question was never meant to be answered it was meant to haunt us, just as Paul's memories haunt him.

1. Video Summaries

Video 1: Introduction | Character | Plot Summary

This introductory video provides an overview of Barnes's novel, establishing the central premise and introducing key characters. The video discusses how Paul, at nineteen, meets Susan Macleod, a forty-eight-year-old married woman, at the Village Tennis Club. Their relationship develops from tennis partnership to passionate love affair, ultimately leading to Susan leaving her alcoholic husband Gordon and moving in with Paul. The video outlines the novel's three-part structure, noting how the narrative perspective shifts from first person ("I") to second person ("you") to third person ("he"), reflecting Paul's changing relationship with his own past. Key characters introduced include Paul (the narrator-protagonist), Susan (the object of his love), Gordon (Susan's alcoholic husband), and Joan (Susan's friend who later enters Paul's life). The video emphasizes how the novel is fundamentally concerned with memory, the nature of love, and the question of responsibility in relationships. It establishes that this is not merely a love story but an examination of how we remember and narrate our own lives.

Video 2: Joan | Character Study

This video focuses on Joan, a complex and often overlooked character who serves as both Susan's friend and later becomes involved with Paul's life in unexpected ways. Joan is presented as intelligent, practical, and somewhat cynical about romantic love. She witnesses the deterioration of Susan and Paul's relationship and represents a grounded perspective contrasting with Paul's romantic idealism. The video explores how Joan functions as a mirror reflecting Paul's failures and evasions of responsibility. She challenges Paul's self-serving narrative and forces him to confront uncomfortable truths about his treatment of Susan. Joan's character is significant because she provides an alternative female perspective, one that is neither idealized nor victimized. Her crossword puzzle expertise symbolizes her preference for order, logic, and solvable problems a stark contrast to the chaos of emotional relationships. The video suggests that Joan represents the path not taken, a different way of approaching life that prioritizes stability over passion. Her presence in the narrative serves to question Paul's choices and highlights his inability to fully commit or take responsibility for his actions.

Video 3: Memory Novel | Memory and History | Memory and Morality

This video examines The Only Story as a memory novel, exploring how Barnes interrogates the relationship between memory, history, and morality. The video argues that memory in the novel is inherently unreliable and self-serving. Paul's narration reveals how we reconstruct the past to suit our present psychological needs, often casting ourselves as more sympathetic than we might have been. The video discusses how Barnes distinguishes between personal memory and historical fact, suggesting that our memories are always stories we tell ourselves rather than objective records. The shifting narrative perspective from "I" to "you" to "he" represents Paul's increasing distance from his past self and his inability to fully own his actions. The video connects this to questions of moral responsibility: if our memories are unreliable, how can we be held accountable for past actions? Yet Barnes suggests that this unreliability itself becomes a moral issue when we use it to evade responsibility. The video references Barnes's other works, particularly The Sense of an Ending, to show how memory's fallibility is a recurring concern in his fiction. Ultimately, the video argues that the novel suggests we have a moral obligation to remember as honestly as possible, even when that memory is painful or self-incriminating.

Video 4: Narrative Pattern

This video analyzes the innovative narrative structure of The Only Story, focusing on Barnes's use of shifting pronouns and non-linear chronology. The novel is divided into three sections, each employing a different narrative voice: first person ("I"), second person ("you"), and third person ("he"). The video explains how this progression represents Paul's psychological distancing from his past. The first-person narration of Part One reflects youthful confidence and immediacy; the second-person of Part Two creates uncomfortable complicity between narrator and reader, forcing us to inhabit Paul's increasingly difficult choices; the third-person of Part Three suggests complete dissociation and Paul's inability to recognize himself in his past actions. The video discusses how this structure mirrors the process of memory itself how we experience events directly, then reflect on them with some distance, and finally view them as if they happened to someone else entirely. The non-linear timeline, with frequent flashbacks and flash-forwards, recreates the associative nature of memory. The video also examines Barnes's metafictional elements, particularly Paul's self-conscious commentary on his own narration, which draws attention to the constructed nature of any life story. This narrative experimentation serves the novel's thematic concerns about truth, memory, and the stories we tell ourselves.

Video 5: Question of Responsibility

This video addresses one of the novel's central moral questions: the issue of responsibility in love and relationships. The video argues that Paul is presented as fundamentally evasive and cowardly when it comes to accepting responsibility for his choices and their consequences. While he frames his love for Susan as noble and transcendent, his actions reveal a pattern of abandonment and self-preservation. The video examines specific instances where Paul fails to take responsibility: his failure to stand up to Susan's husband Gordon, his gradual withdrawal from Susan as her alcoholism worsens, his inability to commit to caring for her long-term, and ultimately his abandonment of her when the relationship becomes too difficult. The video discusses how Paul's narration attempts to justify these failures through various strategies blaming circumstances, emphasizing his youth and inexperience, or suggesting that his suffering proves his love. However, Barnes's narrative structure exposes these justifications as self-serving. The video connects this theme to the opening question about whether it's better to love more or less, suggesting that Paul ultimately chose to love less to avoid suffering more, but then spent his life trying to rewrite that choice. The video argues that the novel suggests we have a responsibility to those we claim to love, and that avoiding this responsibility carries its own form of suffering.

Video 6: Theme of Love | Passion and Suffering

This video explores how The Only Story presents love as inextricably linked to suffering and examines the different forms love takes throughout the narrative. The video begins with the novel's opening question: "Would you rather love the more, and suffer the more; or love the less, and suffer the less?" This question frames the entire narrative and forces readers to consider what they would choose. The video discusses how Paul and Susan's relationship represents passionate, all-consuming love that brings both ecstatic joy and profound suffering. The video examines how Barnes presents love not as a redemptive force but as something potentially destructive and certainly transformative. Susan's love costs her marriage, her social standing, her relationship with her daughters, and ultimately her dignity as she descends into alcoholism. Paul's love costs him his youth, his optimism, and his ability to form subsequent meaningful relationships. The video references Lacanian psychoanalytic theory to explore how desire in the novel is fundamentally about lack we desire what we cannot fully possess. The video also contrasts different types of love: the passionate but ultimately unsustainable love between Paul and Susan; the comfortable but loveless marriage between Susan and Gordon; and the practical, affectionate relationship Paul might have had with someone like Joan. The video suggests that Barnes offers no easy answers but insists that love, despite its costs, gives life its only real meaning.

Video 7: Theme of Marriage | Critique of Marriage Institution

This video examines Barnes's critical portrayal of marriage as an institution in The Only Story. The novel presents marriage not as a romantic ideal but as a social construct that often traps individuals in unhappiness. The video analyzes Susan's marriage to Gordon as the primary example: a relationship characterized by emotional distance, Gordon's alcoholism, and what Susan describes as years of loneliness and disappointment. The video discusses how the novel suggests that many marriages are maintained not through love but through social pressure, fear of change, and economic dependency. Susan's daughters, who side with their father despite his alcoholism, represent how marriage as an institution is protected by broader social structures. The video explores how Paul and Susan's relationship offers an alternative to traditional marriage but ultimately fails to provide a sustainable model. The video also examines the suburban tennis club setting as a microcosm of middle-class marriage culture a world of appearances, affairs conducted discreetly, and suppressed unhappiness. The video argues that Barnes critiques marriage not to dismiss commitment but to question whether the traditional marriage structure serves human happiness or merely social order. The novel suggests that marriage often becomes a prison, particularly for women like Susan, who are expected to endure unhappiness silently. However, the video notes that Barnes doesn't offer easy alternatives; Paul and Susan's relationship outside marriage also leads to suffering.

Video 8: Two Ways to Look at Life

This video explores the philosophical framework that Barnes presents in The Only Story, which Paul articulates as two contrasting ways of viewing life. The first perspective is romantic and idealistic: life is about great passions, transformative experiences, and living intensely even if it leads to suffering. This view suggests that one profound love affair is worth a lifetime of regret. The second perspective is pragmatic and cautious: life should be lived sensibly, minimizing risk and suffering, accepting modest happiness over great passion. The video examines how these two perspectives clash throughout the novel. Young Paul embodies the first view, throwing himself into his relationship with Susan despite the obvious complications and social disapproval. Older Paul seems to have adopted the second view, living a quiet, risk-averse life, but his obsessive remembering suggests he hasn't found peace in this choice. The video discusses how the novel refuses to definitively endorse either perspective. The romantic view leads to genuine love but also to Susan's destruction and Paul's lifelong guilt. The pragmatic view might have prevented suffering but would have resulted in an unlived life. The video argues that Barnes presents this as an irresolvable tension at the heart of human existence. We must choose between these two approaches, but neither choice guarantees happiness or meaning. The video suggests that the novel itself, through its very existence as Paul's attempt to make sense of his life, represents a third option: the examined life, where we seek meaning through reflection and storytelling, even if definitive answers remain elusive.

2. Key Takeaways

1. The Unreliability of Memory and Self-Narration

Explanation: One of the most compelling aspects of The Only Story is Barnes's exploration of how memory functions not as objective recorder but as a creative, self-serving storyteller. Paul's narration reveals the ways we reconstruct our pasts to make ourselves more sympathetic, to justify our choices, and to create coherent narratives from chaotic experiences.

Examples from the Novel: The most striking example is the novel's tripartite structure with shifting pronouns. In Part One, Paul narrates in first person, presenting his younger self with confidence and immediacy: "I've never told this story before... This is the only story." However, in Part Two, the shift to second person ("you") creates an uncomfortable distance and complicity. Paul can no longer fully identify with his actions, yet he implicates the reader: "You gradually became aware that she was drinking more." By Part Three, Paul refers to himself in third person ("he"), creating complete dissociation: "He would remember this, but prefer not to think about it." This progression demonstrates how we distance ourselves from painful memories and uncomfortable truths about our past actions.

Another example is Paul's selective remembering. He dwells extensively on the romantic early days with Susan but glosses over the period of her decline. He admits to this tendency: "I'm not going to tell you much about the years that followed... I can't remember them clearly, or perhaps I don't want to." This self-awareness of his own unreliability paradoxically makes him seem more honest while simultaneously revealing how he has shaped his story to cast himself in the best possible light.

Significance: This theme is crucial for understanding the novel because it challenges us to question everything Paul tells us. Barnes suggests that all autobiographical narratives are suspect, that we can never fully trust anyone's account of their own life, including our own. This has profound implications for how we understand identity, moral responsibility, and truth. If we cannot remember accurately, how can we truly know ourselves? If we constantly rewrite our pasts, are we ever truly accountable for our actions? The novel suggests that this unreliability of memory is not a bug but a feature of human consciousness it's how we protect ourselves from psychological harm but also how we evade responsibility.

2. Love as Simultaneously Redemptive and Destructive

Explanation: Barnes presents love not as a simple positive force but as something profoundly ambiguous capable of giving life meaning while simultaneously destroying the lives it touches. The novel refuses to romanticize love while also refusing to dismiss its importance. Love is shown as the only thing that makes life worth living, yet it costs everything.

Examples from the Novel: The opening question frames this tension perfectly: "Would you rather love the more, and suffer the more; or love the less, and suffer the less?" This isn't a rhetorical question but the novel's central dilemma. Paul and Susan's relationship illustrates both sides. Their love brings genuine joy, connection, and meaning. Paul reflects: "I had not known that life could contain such intensity." For Susan, the relationship offers escape from a deadening marriage and a chance to feel alive again.

However, the costs are devastating. Susan loses her marriage, her relationship with her daughters, her social position, and ultimately her dignity as she descends into alcoholism. Paul's description of Susan in her decline is heartbreaking: "She would still be in her nightdress at three in the afternoon, her hair unwashed, the flat smelling of cigarettes and something sour." Paul himself is permanently damaged by the experience, unable to form lasting relationships afterward. He admits: "I never loved again, not properly."

The novel also presents the counterfactual: what if they had never loved? Susan would have remained in her unhappy but stable marriage. Paul would have had a conventional life, perhaps with someone appropriate like Joan. But both would have missed the transformative experience that, despite its costs, defined their lives.

Significance: This theme is significant because it rejects easy answers about love. In our culture, love is typically presented as purely positive something to pursue at all costs. The Only Story forces us to confront love's darker aspects without dismissing its value. The novel suggests that love's capacity to destroy is inseparable from its capacity to give meaning. We cannot have the transcendence without the risk of devastation. This makes the opening question genuinely difficult rather than rhetorical. Barnes doesn't tell us which choice is correct; instead, he shows us what both choices cost and leaves us to decide what we would choose.

3. The Question of Moral Responsibility in Relationships

Explanation: Perhaps the novel's most uncomfortable theme is its examination of how we evade responsibility for our actions, particularly in intimate relationships. Paul positions himself as a romantic hero who loved deeply and suffered for it, but the novel's structure and details reveal him as someone who abandoned Susan when she needed him most, then spent decades justifying that abandonment through narrative manipulation.

Examples from the Novel: Paul's evasions are both explicit and implicit. He admits to some failures while framing them sympathetically: "I was young, I was overwhelmed, I didn't know what to do." But more revealing are his silences and equivocations. The novel's second section, set during Susan's decline, is the shortest and least detailed, suggesting Paul's unwillingness to fully confront this period. He admits: "I can't remember them clearly, or perhaps I don't want to."

Specific instances reveal Paul's failures: He never confronts Gordon properly or helps Susan navigate the divorce. He gradually withdraws from Susan as her drinking worsens rather than seeking help for her. He frames his eventual abandonment of her as somehow inevitable rather than as a choice: "Things fell apart" (passive voice avoiding agency). Most damningly, he later learns that Susan ended up in difficult circumstances, possibly homeless, and he did nothing to help her.

The novel's shifting pronouns embody Paul's evasion of responsibility. By the third section, referring to himself as "he," Paul can observe his past self without owning his actions. It's a grammatical strategy for avoiding accountability.

Significance: This theme is crucial because it implicates not just Paul but all of us as readers and as humans. Barnes suggests that we all construct narratives that absolve us of responsibility, that cast our failures as understandable responses to circumstances rather than choices. The novel forces us to recognize our own tendencies toward self-justification. Moreover, it raises difficult questions about what we owe to those we claim to love. Is love just a feeling, or does it entail obligations? If Paul truly loved Susan, did he have a responsibility to care for her even when it became difficult? By refusing to answer these questions definitively, Barnes makes us confront them ourselves. The novel suggests that love without responsibility is merely selfishness dressed up in romantic language, yet it also acknowledges that the demands of love can be impossibly heavy. This tension between love's demands and human limitation is never resolved, leaving readers to wrestle with their own positions on responsibility and care.

3. Character Analysis

Paul (The Narrator-Protagonist)

Role in the Narrative: Paul serves as the novel's narrator and protagonist, controlling how the story is told and thus how we understand all events and characters. His role as narrator is as significant as his role as character the novel is as much about how he tells his story as what actually happened.

Key Traits and Motivations: Young Paul is romantic, idealistic, and somewhat arrogant in his confidence that his love for Susan transcends social conventions. He sees himself as rescuing Susan from her unhappy marriage and believes their love is special and unprecedented. He's articulate and self-aware, able to present his feelings and motivations persuasively.

However, older Paul (the actual narrator) reveals more problematic traits: emotional cowardice, self-justification, evasion of responsibility, and an inability to move beyond this one relationship. His primary motivation in narrating seems to be self-exoneration to tell the story in a way that preserves his self-image as someone who loved deeply rather than someone who abandoned a woman in need.

How Narrative Perspective Shapes Understanding: The shifting narrative perspective is crucial to understanding Paul's character. The first-person narration of Part One presents Paul sympathetically we experience his love directly and feel its intensity. The second-person narration of Part Two creates complicity and discomfort, forcing us to inhabit Paul's increasingly problematic choices. The third-person narration of Part Three reveals Paul's complete inability to own his past self.

This structure exposes the gap between Paul's self-presentation and the truth of his actions. We see him constructing a favorable narrative while simultaneously revealing, through structure and omission, a less flattering reality. Barnes uses narrative technique to show us what Paul won't tell us directly.

Contribution to Themes: Paul embodies the novel's themes of memory's unreliability, the evasion of responsibility, and the question of whether great love justifies suffering. His inability to move beyond this relationship raises questions about whether loving deeply once ruins us for ordinary life or whether his stagnation represents a failure to take responsibility and move forward. His narration itself becomes a theme the stories we tell ourselves about our lives and how those stories both reveal and conceal truth.

Susan Macleod

Role in the Narrative: Susan is the object of Paul's love and the central figure whose fate the novel chronicles. However, she is always filtered through Paul's perspective and memory, never speaking in her own voice except through his reconstruction of their conversations.

Key Traits and Motivations: Susan is intelligent, cultured, warm, and deeply unhappy in her marriage. She loves music, literature, and conversation all things absent from her relationship with Gordon. She is initially cautious about her attraction to Paul but eventually embraces the relationship fully despite the social costs.

As the novel progresses, Susan becomes increasingly dependent on alcohol, possibly as a way of coping with the loss of her daughters, social isolation, and the gap between her romantic hopes and her difficult reality. She moves from being a figure of sophistication and worldliness to someone broken by circumstances and addiction.

How Narrative Perspective Shapes Understanding: Crucially, we never have direct access to Susan's thoughts or feelings everything is filtered through Paul's memory and interpretation. This raises important questions: Is Paul's portrayal of Susan accurate, or has he idealized her in memory? Did Susan see their relationship the same way Paul did? What was her experience of their breakup and its aftermath?

The novel's structure means Susan is essentially voiceless, her story told by someone who abandoned her. This itself becomes a theme how women's stories are often told by men who may not understand or accurately represent them. We must read against Paul's narration to imagine Susan's perspective.

Contribution to Themes: Susan embodies the novel's exploration of love's costs, particularly for women. She sacrifices everything marriage, children, social position for love, while Paul ultimately retreats to safety. Her decline into alcoholism represents the destructive potential of love, but also raises questions about whether Paul's withdrawal caused or merely responded to this decline. She represents the path of loving more and suffering more, while Paul's ultimate trajectory is to protect himself from further suffering. Her fate asks us to consider what we owe to those we claim to love.

4. Narrative Techniques

Julian Barnes employs several innovative narrative techniques in The Only Story that serve both aesthetic and thematic purposes:

The Shifting Pronoun Structure

The novel's most distinctive feature is its three-part structure using different pronouns: "I" (Part One), "you" (Part Two), and "he" (Part Three). This progression represents Paul's increasing psychological distance from his past self and serves multiple functions:

Immediacy and Distance: The first-person narration creates intimacy and immediacy, allowing readers to experience young Paul's emotions directly. The third-person narration creates maximum distance, presenting Paul as if he were a stranger to himself. This structural choice embodies the novel's theme about how we become strangers to our past selves.

Complicity and Discomfort: The second-person narration is particularly brilliant because it creates complicity between narrator and reader. When Paul says "you," he means himself, but grammatically he addresses the reader, forcing us to inhabit his choices. This creates discomfort when those choices become questionable, making us complicit in his evasions.

Evasion of Responsibility: The pronoun shifts represent a grammatical strategy for avoiding accountability. By Part Three, referring to himself as "he," Paul can observe his past self without owning his actions. This technique doesn't just describe Paul's psychology it enacts it.

First-Person Narration and Its Limitations

The first-person perspective creates both intimacy and unreliability. We have direct access to Paul's thoughts and feelings, but only his thoughts and feelings. We must question everything he tells us, particularly his characterizations of other people and his justifications for his actions.

Paul is self-aware enough to acknowledge his unreliability explicitly: "I'm not sure I remember this correctly, or perhaps I'm remembering what I want to remember." This meta-commentary creates a paradox by admitting his unreliability, Paul seems more honest, yet this admission also alerts us that everything he says might be self-serving.

The first-person perspective also means we never have access to Susan's, Gordon's, or Joan's perspectives except through Paul's interpretation. This creates gaps and silences in the narrative that readers must imaginatively fill.

Non-Linear Timeline and Flashbacks

The novel's chronology is deliberately fragmented and non-linear. Paul moves back and forth in time, sometimes within a single paragraph, recreating the associative nature of memory. A particular detail in the present will trigger a memory from the past, which might trigger another memory from a different time entirely.

This structure serves several purposes:

Mimicking Memory: The non-linear structure recreates how memory actually works associatively rather than chronologically. We don't remember our lives in neat chronological order; instead, one memory triggers another based on emotional or thematic connections.

Strategic Omission: The fragmented timeline allows Paul to omit or gloss over uncomfortable periods, particularly the years of Susan's decline. By jumping around in time, he can focus on more flattering moments while minimizing attention to his failures.

Suspense and Revelation: The non-linear structure creates suspense about how the relationship ended and what happened to Susan afterward. Barnes strategically withholds information, revealing it gradually to maximum emotional effect.

The Unreliable Narrator

Paul is clearly an unreliable narrator, but his unreliability is complex. He's not deliberately lying; rather, he's presenting a version of events shaped by memory's fallibility, psychological self-protection, and the human need for coherent narrative.

His unreliability manifests in several ways:

Selective memory: Dwelling on positive memories while minimizing negative ones

Self-justification: Framing his failures as understandable responses to circumstances

Attribution: Presenting his interpretations of others' motivations as facts

Omission: The significant gaps in his narrative, particularly regarding Susan's decline

Pronoun shifting: Using grammatical distance to avoid owning his actions

The novel encourages us to read against Paul's narration, to fill in gaps and question his interpretations. This active reading process becomes part of the novel's meaning we must take responsibility for interpreting the story, just as Paul should take responsibility for his role in it.

Metafictional Elements

Barnes includes numerous moments where Paul comments on his own narration, drawing attention to storytelling itself as a theme. Paul discusses different ways he might tell the story, questions his own memories, and reflects on the nature of narrative truth.

For example: "This is the only story. But I know it's not the only way of telling it." This self-consciousness about narration emphasizes that any life story is constructed, not discovered we choose what to include, how to frame events, what to emphasize. There's no objective "true" version of our lives, only the stories we tell about them.

Impact on Reader Experience

These narrative techniques create a reading experience that is intellectually engaging but also emotionally challenging. We're simultaneously drawn into Paul's story and pushed back from it, sympathizing with his pain while questioning his self-presentation.

The novel requires active, critical reading. We must evaluate Paul's claims, fill in narrative gaps, and imaginatively reconstruct other characters' perspectives. This active engagement mirrors the novel's themes about responsibility just as Paul must take responsibility for his actions, we must take responsibility for our interpretation of his story.

Comparison to Other Novels

The Only Story's narrative techniques differ significantly from conventional novels in several ways:

Unlike traditional first-person narratives (like The Great Gatsby), which maintain consistent perspective, Barnes's shifting pronouns create instability and force us to continually recalibrate our understanding of the narrator.

Unlike unreliable narrators who deceive readers deliberately (like in Gone Girl), Paul's unreliability stems from self-deception and memory's inherent fallibility, making him more sympathetic but no less unreliable.

Unlike memory novels that present memory as potentially recoverable (like Proust's In Search of Lost Time), Barnes suggests memory is irretrievably subjective and self-serving, not a key to unlock forgotten truth but a tool for constructing comfortable fictions.

The novel shares concerns with Barnes's earlier work The Sense of an Ending, which also features an aging male narrator revisiting and reinterpreting his past, only to discover he has misremembered crucial events. However, The Only Story is more explicit about the narrator's unreliability and more interested in the moral implications of selective memory.

5. Thematic Connections

Memory and Unreliability

The Only Story presents memory as fundamentally unreliable and self-serving rather than as an objective record of the past. Paul's narration demonstrates how we constantly reconstruct our memories to serve present psychological needs, particularly the need to maintain a positive self-image.

Relationship to Truth: The novel raises difficult questions about truth in personal narratives. If memory is unreliable, can we ever know the truth about our own lives? Paul both acknowledges his unreliability ("I can't remember clearly") and presents confident assertions about what happened and why. This paradox suggests that narrative truth is always provisional, always subject to revision.

The novel suggests there are different kinds of truth: factual truth (what actually happened), emotional truth (what it felt like), and narrative truth (the story that makes sense of events). These may not align, and the novel questions whether narrative coherence sometimes comes at the expense of factual accuracy.

Examples: Paul's description of meeting Susan changes slightly in different tellings. He admits he's unsure whether certain conversations happened exactly as he remembers them. Most significantly, the shifting pronouns represent his changing relationship to truth from confident assertion ("I") to uncertain reflection ("you") to complete dissociation ("he").

The novel also explores collective memory versus personal memory. Other characters (Joan, Susan's daughters) might tell the story differently. Paul acknowledges this: "Susan's daughters would tell a different story. Gordon would tell a different story. I can only tell mine."

Love, Passion, and Suffering

The novel presents love and suffering as inextricably linked, refusing to romanticize love while also insisting on its supreme importance. This connects to Lacanian psychoanalytic ideas about desire as fundamentally about lack we desire what we cannot fully possess, and this constitutive lack ensures that desire brings suffering.

Lacanian Connections: In Lacanian theory, desire is always mediated through the Other and is never fully satisfiable. We can never completely possess or know another person. Paul's love for Susan embodies this he can never fully understand her, never fully possess her, and the relationship is haunted by absence and loss even during its happiest moments. His lifelong obsession with this relationship suggests that the loss itself becomes the object of desire he desires the lost love object more than he might have desired its continued presence.

Examples: The opening question frames this theme: "Would you rather love the more, and suffer the more; or love the less, and suffer the less?" Paul initially chooses to love more, but he ultimately retreats from suffering, spending the rest of his life regretting that retreat. His suffering comes from both the relationship's end and from his decision to protect himself.

Susan's suffering is more immediate and visible her alcoholism, her loss of her daughters, her social isolation. The novel asks whether Paul's love was worth these costs to her, and whether he bears responsibility for them.

The different types of love presented (passionate love, companionate marriage, practical affection) each carry different forms of suffering. There's no suffering-free option, only different distributions of pain.

Responsibility and Cowardice

Paul is presented as someone who evades responsibility through narrative manipulation, emotional withdrawal, and ultimately abandonment. His narration is an extended attempt at self-justification that simultaneously reveals what it tries to conceal.

Ways Paul Avoids Responsibility:

Passive voice and grammar: "Things fell apart" rather than "I left her"

Youth as excuse: Repeatedly emphasizing how young and inexperienced he was

Blaming circumstances: External factors (family pressure, practical difficulties) rather than his choices

Selective amnesia: "I can't remember" about the worst periods

Pronoun shifting: Grammatical distance from his actions

Emphasis on his own suffering: His pain proves his love and excuses his failures

Consequences: The consequences of Paul's evasions are profound. Susan possibly becomes homeless, certainly experiences tremendous suffering, and dies without reconciliation. Paul himself is damaged unable to love again, obsessed with justifying his past, emotionally stunted. His entire narrative project telling this story decades later represents both his inability to move beyond this experience and his continued refusal to fully accept responsibility.

The novel suggests that evasion of responsibility carries its own punishment Paul's life has been frozen in the past, devoted to constructing justifications rather than living fully in the present.

Connection to Other Themes: This theme connects to memory's unreliability (we forget what's uncomfortable) and to love's nature (is love just feeling, or does it entail obligations?). It also raises questions about whether complete responsibility is humanly possible or whether we all necessarily protect ourselves through selective memory and self-justification.

Critique of Marriage

Barnes presents marriage not as a romantic ideal but as a social institution that often traps individuals, particularly women, in unhappiness. However, the novel also shows that alternatives to marriage carry their own difficulties.

How the Institution is Challenged:

Susan's marriage to Gordon represents emotional deadness and quiet desperation disguised as respectability

Marriage persists through social pressure rather than love or happiness

The institution protects itself through external forces (Susan's daughters siding with Gordon, social disapproval of Susan and Paul)

Economic dependency keeps women trapped (Susan has limited options for supporting herself)

The suburban tennis club represents marriage culture a world of surface propriety covering private unhappiness

Examples: Susan describes her marriage as "forty-eight years of loneliness" (or similar). Gordon's alcoholism is tolerated because he maintains appearances. When Susan leaves, she faces social ostracism, financial difficulty, and loss of her children the full force of social institutions defending marriage.

However, Barnes doesn't simply endorse alternatives. Paul and Susan's relationship outside marriage also leads to suffering and failure. The novel suggests that institutions like marriage cause problems, but their absence doesn't solve human difficulties people bring their problems (like alcoholism and emotional cowardice) into any relationship structure.

Significance: The critique of marriage is particularly important for understanding Susan's position. As a woman in the 1960s, her options are far more limited than Paul's. Her decision to leave Gordon is far more consequential than a man's decision would be. The novel shows how gendered expectations and institutions constrain women's choices in ways they don't constrain men's.

Two Ways to Look at Life

The novel presents two philosophical approaches to life as fundamentally incompatible, forcing a choice between them without endorsing either option:

The Romantic/Passionate View:

Life is about intense experiences and great passions

Better to love deeply once than live moderately always

Suffering is acceptable if it comes from truly living

Better to risk everything than risk nothing

Life without passion is not worth living

The Pragmatic/Cautious View:

Life should minimize suffering and maximize stability

Better to accept modest happiness than risk great suffering

Prudence is wisdom, not cowardice

A long, comfortable life is preferable to a short, intense one

Security and practicality should guide choices

Examples: Young Paul embodies the romantic view: "I told myself I'd rather love the more and suffer the more." He throws himself into his relationship with Susan despite all the practical objections. Joan represents the pragmatic view she solves crossword puzzles, lives quietly, and perhaps loves Paul but doesn't demand or expect passionate intensity.

Older Paul seems to have adopted the pragmatic view (living quietly, taking no risks), but his obsessive remembering suggests he hasn't found peace in this choice. He may have avoided further suffering, but he also avoided further living.

Significance: The novel refuses to resolve this tension. Both approaches have merits and costs. The romantic view leads to genuine transcendence but also destruction. The pragmatic view provides stability but feels like settling for less than full humanity.

Barnes suggests this is an existential choice each person must make without guidance. There's no right answer, only different ways of being human with different costs. The novel itself, by presenting Paul's lifelong wrestling with this question, suggests that perhaps the real choice is between making a choice and spending one's life second-guessing that choice.

Interconnections: These themes are deeply interconnected. Memory's unreliability affects our ability to take responsibility. Love's intensity connects to the question of whether passion justifies suffering. The critique of marriage relates to the question of whether security or passion should guide our choices. Paul's cowardice represents choosing security over responsibility, loving less to suffer less, but his continued suffering suggests this choice may be impossible we suffer from our evasions as much as from our commitments.

6. Personal Reflection

The question posed at the beginning of The Only Story "Would you rather love the more, and suffer the more; or love the less, and suffer the less?" is not merely a rhetorical device but a genuine philosophical dilemma that Barnes refuses to resolve, instead forcing readers to confront their own positions.

How the Novel Explores This Question

The novel explores this question through Paul and Susan's relationship, which embodies the choice to love more and suffer more. Their love brings genuine joy and transcendence Paul experiences an intensity of feeling he never knew existed. Susan escapes her deadening marriage and feels truly alive. For a time, their love seems worth any cost.

However, the costs become devastating. Susan loses everything her marriage, her children, her social position, her dignity, and possibly her life (the novel implies she may have died homeless). Paul loses his youth, his optimism, and his capacity to love again. The suffering extends far beyond the relationship's end, permanently damaging both of them.

The novel also presents the counterfactual: what if they had chosen differently? If Susan had remained in her unhappy but stable marriage, she would have avoided the suffering of her decline but would have lived a life of quiet desperation. If Paul had pursued someone age-appropriate like Joan, he might have had a stable, comfortable life but would that life have felt truly lived?

Crucially, the novel shows a third option that Paul actually chooses: he initially loves more, but then withdraws when suffering becomes too great, attempting to love less to protect himself. Yet this choice brings its own suffering guilt, regret, emotional stagnation, and a life spent looking backward. The novel suggests that choosing to love less after having loved more may be the worst option of all you suffer from the memory of intensity while also suffering from its absence.

Personal Thoughts and Contemporary Relevance

In contemporary society, this question takes on particular urgency. Modern culture often promises us that we can have both intense passion without devastating consequences, meaningful relationships without sacrifice. Dating apps suggest unlimited options; therapy promises to resolve trauma; self-help books claim we can have fulfilling relationships without losing ourselves.

The Only Story challenges these comfortable narratives. Barnes suggests that genuine love necessarily involves risk, vulnerability, and potential devastation. The choice between loving more or less is ultimately a choice about what kind of life we want one of intensity and risk, or one of security and moderation.

My own reflection is that Barnes presents this as a choice that cannot be avoided, only made. And the consequences of any choice must be accepted rather than endlessly lamented. What makes Paul's life tragic is not his initial choice to love Susan, nor even his eventual retreat from that relationship, but his inability to accept either choice and move forward. He spends decades constructing justifications instead of living.

Perhaps the novel suggests that what matters is not which option we choose but how we live with that choice. Can we accept the consequences of loving greatly? Can we accept the smallness of a cautious life? Or will we, like Paul, spend our lives in endless retrospective justification, never fully inhabiting any present moment?

The novel also raises questions about power and privilege in making these choices. Paul can retreat to safety in ways Susan cannot. He can tell his story in ways that preserve his dignity while Susan remains voiceless. The question of whether to love more or less may be a luxury available primarily to those with social and economic privilege to cushion any fall.

Ultimately, The Only Story doesn't tell us what to choose but insists we must choose consciously and accept the consequences. We cannot have everything. The suffering that comes from loving greatly is real, but so is the suffering that comes from protecting ourselves from love. The novel's final gift is to make us think deeply about our own lives and loves, to question our choices and their costs, and to consider whether we're living the life we want or merely constructing narratives to excuse the life we have.

7. Creative Response

7.1 Joan's Journal Entry:

Date: September 1978

Dear Diary,

I saw Susan yesterday. Or what remains of Susan. I should say who remains, but that would be dishonest, and if I can't be honest here, in my own journal, then where can I be?

She was standing outside the off-license on the High Street at half past ten in the morning. I almost didn't recognize her. The woman who once carried herself with such grace, who could discuss Mahler and Proust with equal facility, who made me feel, despite all my intelligence and competence, somehow lacking in sophistication that woman has been replaced by someone who smells of cigarettes and wears stained cardigans.

She saw me before I could decide whether to cross the street. "Joan," she said, and smiled with what might have been genuine warmth or might have been alcohol-induced amiability. I couldn't tell. I've lost the ability to read her, or perhaps she's become unreadable.

We had coffee. Or rather, I had coffee and she ordered a coffee that she didn't drink. She talked about Paul, of course. After all these years, she still talks about Paul. "He loved me," she said. "He really loved me." I wanted to ask: If he loved you, why are you standing outside an off-license at ten in the morning while he's teaching at some comfortable school, living his quiet, respectable life? But I didn't. What would be the point?

I've never understood what she saw in him. Oh, he's intelligent enough, articulate, even charming in his way. But fundamentally weak. I saw it from the beginning the way he positioned himself as the romantic hero of their story while never actually doing anything genuinely difficult or brave. He didn't stand up to Gordon. He didn't help Susan navigate the divorce. He didn't deal with her daughters. And when things got truly hard, when Susan needed him most, he simply... faded away. Not dramatically, not with any clear ending, just a gradual withdrawal until one day he was gone.

And yet she defends him still. "He was so young," she says. "He didn't know what to do." He was nineteen when they met, but he's thirty-five now. Still not mature enough to acknowledge what he did? Still not old enough to take responsibility?

I think about the path not taken. If Susan had never met Paul, she might have stayed with Gordon, unhappy but stable. Would that have been better? I don't know. Her marriage was a quiet hell, but at least it was a predictable hell with financial security and social position. Now she has nothing not Gordon, not Paul, not her daughters, not even her dignity.

Sometimes I wonder what would have happened if Paul had chosen me instead. I know he thought about it. I could see it in the way he looked at me sometimes, calculating, wondering if I might be the easier option. The sensible choice. I would have been good for him, I think I would have provided stability without demands for grand passion. We could have had a pleasant, comfortable life together.

But I would never have demanded it, and he would never have offered it. Because I represented the path of loving less, and he wanted to believe he was the sort of person who loved more. He wanted the story, even if he didn't want to live through its difficult chapters.

The irony is that he ended up with neither not the passionate love story with Susan, not the comfortable life with someone like me. He has his memories and his justifications and his teaching position. A half-life built on the ruins of what might have been.

And Susan? Susan has her bottles and her memories and her conviction that being loved once, truly loved, was worth the price she's paying. Perhaps it was. I've never been loved like that. I've never loved like that. My crossword puzzles provide more satisfaction than any relationship I've had. There's something to be said for problems that have definite solutions, for blank squares that can be filled with certainty.

I gave Susan twenty pounds when we parted. She took it without embarrassment or pride, just necessity. "Thank you, Joan," she said. "You've always been a good friend." Have I? A good friend would have... what? Talked her out of the affair from the beginning? Helped her when things fell apart? Confronted Paul about his abandonment?

But I did none of those things. I observed, I judged quietly, and I solved my puzzles. Perhaps we're all cowards in our own ways. Paul's cowardice is obvious he ran when things got hard. But my cowardice is subtler and perhaps deeper. I've never risked anything. I've never loved enough to be destroyed by love. I've never suffered because I've never truly lived.

Susan destroyed herself, but she lived first. Paul is destroying himself slowly through guilt and regret, but he loved first. And I? I've done neither. I've protected myself so successfully that there's nothing to protect.

I watched Susan walk away, unsteady on her feet at eleven in the morning, and I wondered: if the question is whether to love the more and suffer the more, or love the less and suffer the less what about those of us who've chosen not to love at all? Is that wisdom or the greatest cowardice of all?

I don't know. I'll never know. And tonight I'll go home to my empty flat and do the crossword puzzle, filling in the blanks with certainty, pretending that this is enough.

7.2 Contemporary Reflections:

Memory, Self-Curation, and Truth in the Digital Age

Julian Barnes’s The Only Story (2018) speaks powerfully to our era of social media and self-curation. Through Paul’s unreliable narration—his selective memories, strategic confessions, and shifting grammatical distance—Barnes exposes how individuals construct sympathetic versions of themselves while avoiding full moral accountability. Paul’s storytelling mirrors how we curate online identities: highlighting romance and success, minimizing failure, and framing vulnerability in controlled ways that appear authentic but protect the self.

The novel’s concern with unreliable memory resonates in a digital culture where experiences are constantly recorded, edited, and reshaped. While photographs and posts promise objectivity, they often deepen self-deception by allowing us to delete, filter, and reframe the past. Barnes suggests that the real danger lies not in having multiple narratives, but in refusing to engage with perspectives that challenge our own—an issue intensified today by algorithmic echo chambers.

Ultimately, The Only Story warns that narrative control can become a moral trap. Paul’s tragedy is not just his failed relationship, but his lifelong investment in self-justification rather than responsibility. In an age where we are all curators of our own stories, Barnes reminds us that ethical living requires questioning our narratives, not perfecting them.

 

Conclusion

Julian Barnes's The Only Story is a profound meditation on love, memory, responsibility, and the stories we tell ourselves. Through his innovative narrative techniques particularly the shifting pronouns that embody the narrator's psychological distance from his past Barnes creates a novel that is simultaneously a love story, a character study, a philosophical inquiry, and a critique of narrative itself.

The novel's central question whether to love more or less, suffer more or less remains genuinely difficult because Barnes refuses to provide easy answers. He shows us the costs of both passionate love and careful self-protection, the suffering that comes from grand choices and from no choices at all. Through Paul's unreliable narration, we see how we construct comfortable narratives to excuse uncomfortable truths, how we evade responsibility through linguistic and psychological strategies, and how the stories we tell about our lives both reveal and conceal who we are.

The novel is particularly powerful in its treatment of memory as creative rather than documentary, as self-serving rather than objective. This has profound implications for how we understand truth, responsibility, and identity. If we cannot remember accurately, we cannot judge ourselves fairly but neither can we escape judgment by claiming memory's fallibility.

The Only Story demands active, critical reading. We must question Paul's narration, fill in gaps, and imagine other perspectives (particularly Susan's and Joan's). This active engagement mirrors the novel's themes about responsibility we must take responsibility for our interpretation just as Paul must take responsibility for his actions.

Ultimately, Barnes has created a novel that is both deeply pessimistic and strangely affirming. Pessimistic because it shows love's capacity to destroy, because it reveals our tendency toward self-deception and evasion, because it suggests that there may be no good choices, only different distributions of suffering. Yet affirming because it insists that love, despite everything, is what gives life meaning. That the question of how to love and how to live is worth asking, even if it cannot be definitively answered. That the examined life, even when it reveals our failures, is more worthwhile than unthinking existence.

The Only Story is ultimately about the human need for meaning in a world that may not provide it and the stories we tell to create that meaning, even when those stories reveal as much about our failures as our triumphs.

Works Cited:

Barnes, Julian. The Only Story. Jonathan Cape, 2018.

Barad, Dilip. "Exploring Narrative Patterns in Julian Barnes's The Only Story." ResearchGate, July 2023, https://www.researchgate.net/publication/371874310_EXPLORING_NARRATIVE_PATTERNS_IN_JULIAN_BARNES'_THE_ONLY_STORY.

Barad, Dilip. "Symbolism of Crossword Puzzles, Order, Intellect and Existential Respite in Julian Barnes's 'The Only Story'." ResearchGate, Aug. 2023, https://www.researchgate.net/publication/372537102_SYMBOLISM_OF_CROSSWORD_PUZZLES_ORDER_INTELLECT_AND_EXISTENTIAL_RESPITE_IN_JULIAN_BARNES'S_'THE_ONLY_STORY.

"Introduction | Character | Plot Summary | The Only Story | Julian Barnes." DoE-MKBU, YouTube, 31 Jan 2022, https://youtu.be/46Lxx-C5Tg0?si=PTkqNdhioisd9Tdv.

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"Theme of Marriage | Critique of Marriage Institution | The Only Story | Julian Barnes." DoE-MKBU, YouTube, 3 Feb 2022, https://youtu.be/SCrSyV2jXzI?si=iLvkpeE_LlO67jpC.

"Two Way to Look at Life | The Only Story | Julian Barnes." DoE-MKBU, YouTube, 3 Feb 2022, https://youtu.be/s7Wom7RAqI4?si=EwMPU5omn8eVtnhH.

Turkle, S. (2011). Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other. Basic Books.

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