Deeply Delving into the ‘I’, The ‘Me’, The my self

In ‘Changing My Mind’, Booker Prize winner Julian Barnes subtly inverts his earlier ‘The Sense of an Ending’ to explore the retrospective self not as a fixed being, but as a contingent becoming.

René Descartes, celebrated for his iconic axiom “I think, therefore I am,” placed the ‘I’ at the centre of thought itself — the conscious subject who, through the act of thinking, affirms existence. This ‘I’ is not merely a mind but the essence of self-awareness, the thinker behind the thought. British novelist Julian Barnes, known for his profound meditations on memory, time, and identity, takes this notion further — situating the I not just in thought, but in the fabric of time and space–—shaped by memory, altered by time, and rewritten by contingent experience. 

Across his literary genius — from The Only Story and The Noise of Time, to Nothing to Be Frightened Of and The Sense of an Ending — Barnes has long wandered the fault lines of truth, tracing the tremors that unsettle certainty, and the soft, shifting contours of the self. In Levels of Life, he writes, “You put together two things that have not been put together before. And the world is changed.” The line lands like a quiet revelation — part of artist’s credo, part of metaphysical spell — as if creation itself is born not of invention, but of unexpected union.

What if the self is less a sculptor and more the clay? In Changing My Mind, Julian Barnes subtly inverts the old philosophical lens, turning it inward to inspect the fault lines of identity–particularly ‘Being’ and ‘Becoming’. The book acts as a quiet sequel — or perhaps a philosophical echo — to the creative alchemy he hinted at in Levels of Life. Here, the question isn’t merely what do we think, but what does thinking do to us? Barnes dismantles the tidy fiction that we change our minds like gears in a machine — smooth, mechanical, deliberate. Instead, he proposes something more unnerving, more intimate: “my mind changed me.” In this reframing, the mind becomes both subject and author, altering the very contours of the ‘I’ it creates and recreates. The forces that move through it — political, emotional, personal — are not external levers, but internal tides, pulling at the roots of selfhood. To change one’s mind, then, is not a decision; it is a becoming.

Memory, for Barnes, is no longer the neat archive his younger self once imagined — a left-luggage office filled with precisely tagged recollections. It is instead a selective, malleable force, one that fades what was once vivid and makes space for reinterpretation. He writes, “Memory, over time, changes, and, indeed, changes our mind.” The transformation is twofold: not only do we remember differently, but those altered memories begin to shape who we become.

This mutability extends to the realm of politics, which Barnes approaches with characteristic scepticism. Raised in a household where “politics, like religion and sex, were never mentioned,”, he arrived late to politics, abstaining from party affiliations and protest movements save for two occasions. Yet he regards the act of voting as a moral imperative — a duty of principle rather than partisanship. Over time, as political parties mutated to suit the winds of populism, Barnes remained a man anchored by consistency, with the argument “I, the voter, have remained a man of principle,” he writes, in defiance of the “faithless, promiscuous, short-termist” political parties .

Barnes is equally insightful on the nature of reading — not just as an act, but as a measure of ‘I’ over time. Youth, he suggests, reads to discover; age rereads to understand. And yet, he resists the myth that older readers are necessarily wiser. “I don’t think you are a more intelligent reader at sixty-five than at twenty-five,” he writes. “Just a more subtle one.” What changes is not intelligence, but texture — the accumulated sediment of life that allows us to register comprehensions we once missed, or to hear old sentences with new resonance.

Inevitably, all of these reflections converge on the subject that has long preoccupied Barnes: time. But for Barnes, time is no neutral background — it is a trickster, a shaper, the silent editor of our lives. We don’t just live in time, we are rewritten by it. As he notes, children experience time as speed, as a race toward the promised land of adulthood. But adulthood reveals time’s true nature — not smooth or sequential, but jerky, punctuated by “frequent hiccups, gear-changes,” most jarringly felt in moments of intense emotions–Love and Grief.

Love, Barnes writes, alters our relationship to time. “The suspension of time might identify love but active presence of time is necessary to verify it.” Love freezes us in the moment — but to endure, it must also move through time. Grief, too, warps time, turning it into a painful paradox. “You want it to stop–to be a state… but you also want it to be a process,” he writes, capturing the strange duality of grief — the desperate desire to hold on and the aching need to move on.

In Changing My Mind, Barnes doesn’t offer tidy conclusions, but instead crafts a mosaic of lived moments, revised beliefs, and intellectual restlessness. The ‘I’ that emerges is neither fixed nor fully knowable. It is a flickering consciousness, stitched together by changing memories, shaped by reading and rereading, buffeted by the politics of the day, and haunted — always — by the unstoppable current of time.

If Descartes gave us the thinking ‘I’, Barnes offers us the remembering, doubting, becoming‘I’ — one that may never fully know itself, but continues, in thought and feeling, to change. And perhaps that, Barnes seems to suggest, is the truest sign of being.