Reconstructed Memory of Love in Julian Barnes’s The Only Story

Julian Barnes’s novel The Only Story (2018) can be read as a monograph on the complications of love. By focalising narrative situations and events through consistently transforming perspective failed lover, Barnes shows how digging into past awakening lens memory lead to previously censored self-realizations. Set in three interconnected parts, increasingly changes disintegrating process an unconventional love affair between late adolescent middle-aged married woman. Considering this, present article has two goals. relying Jacques Lacan’s theory love, paper presents ever-changing, or illusory definition/experience Besides that, by drawing Julia Kristeva’s definition concept shared singularity, argues setting main part revolutionary decade 1960s, difficulty any cohabitation, combination, dialogue, sharing opposing egos discourses. primary aim this paper, therefore, is show narrator his partner fail maintaining their building singularity themselves.