The Only Story (2018) by Julian Barnes is often perceived as a love, aging, and regrets novel. Nevertheless, these interpretations do not give much attention to the fact that the text continuously appeals to the psychological trauma. This paper will examine how The Only Story uses Cathy Caruth theory on trauma to argue that the love itself is an unassimilated experience that can only be perceived late in life through memory, repetition and fragmentation of the narrative. The paper analyses the manifestation of trauma in delayed understanding, linguistic confines, obsessive redundancy, breached timeliness, and fragmented narrative speech. The paper shows that Barnes depicts love not as a redemptive, transformative experience through a close textual analysis but as a psychic break that is forever disorienting the identity. The novel broadens the boundaries of the trauma fiction genre and disrupts racial narratives of recovery and healing by anticipating emotional trauma created by intimate relationships, instead of premises of a cataclysmic event. The paper is relevant to the current literature of trauma studies and Barnes scholarship because it places The Only Story in the context of unresolved and non-therapeutic trauma...
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