For this analysis, I will discuss the concept of point of view / narration in the novel "The Sense of an Ending" (2011) by Julian Barnes. The novel tells the story of Tony Webster, a retired old man living alone that recalls how he and his former girlfriend met a friend called Adrian Finn in school, his tragic death and how their parths diverged after that.
The novel is narrated through a third-person perspective, so we see the action through Tony's point of view. This is an interesting feature because we see the events and the other characters traits through the lens of Tony and the fragmented information he has or wants to share with us. The way characters are depicted is influenced by how Tony thinks of them and how he remembers his relationship to them. This way of narrating, without having objective information, and also, discovering the important plot elements at the same time of the narrator-character, contribute to the feeling of suspense and knowing that the narrator is unreliable. Tony says: "What you end up emembering isn't always the same as what you have witnessed."
This unreliability is sown when we discover that Tony has repressed and also invented memories in order to feel better about his cations in the past and to preserve a sense of himself. There are several quotations throughout the novel that point to this feature of the limited point of view and how we, as people, also invent our memories: "How often do we tell our own life story? How often do we adjust, embellish, make sly cuts? And the longer life goes on, the fewer are those around to challenge our account, to remind us that our life is not our life, merely the story we have told about our life. Told to others, but - mainly - to ourselves."