An analysis of Ian McEwan's The Child in Time, Tom McCarthy's Remainder and Julian Barnes' The Only Story as narratives of memory and melancholy

The concept of melancholy has been discussed, defined, and analyzed throughout history by philosophers, thinkers, and psychoanalysts. In Sigmund Freud's seminal essay titled "Mourning and Melancholia" (1917), melancholia is attached to the concept of loss, and gained a different layer when compared with how it was perceived and defined in the past. At this point, the presence of loss is provided and tested by memory. In this respect, melancholia became interrelated with memory. These two concepts carry various layers within, such as love, death, mourning and time, and including these layers in the analysis vastly contributes to the discussions of melancholy and memory. In the contemporary era, melancholy and memory occupy a significant place both in the contemporary condition of human beings and in the reflection of that condition in the literature of the era. Thus, melancholy and memory have been two of the main focuses of contemporary British fiction. This study will attempt to demonstrate the relationship between melancholy and memory in Ian McEwan's The Child in Time (1987), Tom McCarthy's Remainder (2005), and Julian Barnes' The Only Story (2018) respectively. With their distinct ways of representing melancholy and memory, novels that will be analyzed in this thesis shed different amount of light into different aspects of the concepts.