Main Topics Covered in the Video
This video explains the plot structure, timeline, characters and narrative pattern of The Only Story in detail. It introduces the novel as a memory novel narrated by Paul Roberts, a seventy-year-old man who recounts his life-defining love story. The lecture focuses on:
It also maps how the novel moves between three phases: Paul at 70 narrating, Paul at 19 beginning his affair, and Paul at about 45–50 meeting Susan for the last time in an asylum.
2. Key Arguments and Interpretations Presented
The video strongly argues that memory controls truth in the novel. Since everything is narrated only through Paul, the reader receives only one side of the story and must constantly question whether Paul is lying, hiding facts, or morally justifying himself. The lecturer repeatedly calls Paul a coward narrator who avoids responsibility and reconstructs his past to appear less guilty.
A major interpretation is that Barnes destroys romantic notions of love. Love is presented not as pleasure but as ethical responsibility — and Paul fails this responsibility when Susan becomes alcoholic, mentally ill and dependent. The lecture also compares this novel with Barnes’s The Sense of an Ending, arguing that both novels expose how male narrators distort memory and avoid moral accountability.
3. Specific Examples from the Novel Used in the Discussion
Narrative Pattern in The Only Story
Main Topics Covered in the Video
This video focuses on the narrative pattern and structural design of Julian Barnes’s The Only Story. It explains how Barnes combines classical storytelling methods with postmodern experimentation. The lecture discusses:
The lecture also explains how the story begins with Paul at the age of seventy, moves fifty years into the past, and then progresses chronologically through different stages of his life.
2. Key Arguments and Interpretations Presented
The video argues that although Barnes is a postmodern writer, he deliberately structures this novel along classical narrative lines. By using Samuel Johnson’s definition of a novel—“a small tale generally of love”—Barnes frames The Only Story as a simple love story that actually carries deep philosophical complexity.
A central argument is that memory is unreliable, making Paul an unreliable narrator. Since Paul narrates his own life, his story becomes subjective, selective, and morally biased. The shifting narrative voice from first person to second and third person symbolises Paul’s increasing emotional distance from Susan and from his own past.
The lecture also interprets Barnes’s frequent philosophical reflections as a form of modern authorial commentary, where story functions merely as a framework for meditations on love, guilt, regret, and responsibility.
3. Specific Examples from the Novel Used in the Discussion
1. Main Topics Covered in the Video
This video explores the theme of passion and suffering as the central philosophical concern of The Only Story. It examines how Barnes redefines love not as happiness, but as an experience inseparably connected with pain, regret, and emotional damage. The lecture explains:
2. Key Arguments and Interpretations Presented
The video argues that passion originally meant to suffer, and therefore love is inherently connected to pain. Barnes deliberately dismantles romantic narratives of love by showing that intense desire inevitably produces suffering. Paul’s love story is interpreted as a movement from youthful infatuation to lifelong emotional damage.
Using a Lacanian framework, the lecture interprets love as an unconscious attempt to fill psychological gaps created by repression. When love-objects are human beings, suffering becomes unavoidable because both individuals carry their own emotional deficiencies. Susan’s childhood trauma and alcoholism are explained as consequences of unhealed repression, while Paul’s repeated moral confusion reveals how love becomes destructive rather than redemptive.
The lecture further argues that Barnes rejects cinematic and sentimental ideas of redemption, closure, and happy endings, presenting love instead as a “beautiful disaster.”
3. Specific Examples from the Novel Used in the Discussion
The Only Story as a Memory Novel
Main Topics Covered in the Video
This video examines The Only Story as a memory novel and studies how Julian Barnes treats memory as personal history rather than factual truth. It connects the novel with philosophical and critical discussions on history, memory, trauma, morality and ethics. The lecture explains:
2. Key Arguments and Interpretations Presented
The central argument is that memory cannot be trusted as truth because human beings continuously revise, distort and manipulate their own memories. Barnes presents Paul as someone who lies to himself while narrating his own life. Since memory becomes personal history, Paul becomes both historian and distorter of his own past.
The lecture uses the film Memento to argue that memory and morality are inseparably connected. When memory is manipulated, moral responsibility disappears. Barnes similarly shows that Paul avoids full responsibility for Susan’s tragic condition by reshaping memory. Trauma is also interpreted as a form of memory—painful experiences that cannot be shared publicly and remain confined to personal narration.
Another key argument is that memory prioritises happy memories first, gradually revealing disturbing truths later, showing how memory functions as psychological self-protection.
3. Specific Examples from the Novel Used in the Discussion
Main Topics Covered in the Video
This video presents a character study of Joan (John) and explains how her life offers a philosophical alternative to the tragic lives of Paul and Susan. The lecture discusses:
2. Key Arguments and Interpretations Presented
The central argument is that human beings who are emotionally damaged often multiply each other’s suffering when they enter relationships. Susan’s tragedy continues because she repeatedly seeks healing through human partners who themselves carry emotional gaps and ambitions.
In contrast, Joan gradually withdraws from destructive romantic relationships and redirects her emotional attachment toward pets, who do not demand emotional reciprocation. This shift symbolises a non-destructive alternative to human love. The lecture uses Lacanian ideas to argue that damaged individuals searching for love-objects in other damaged humans only deepen their trauma.
Joan’s life represents a quiet survival strategy — choosing companionship that does not demand, betray, or dominate.
3. Specific Examples from the Novel Used in the Discussion
Central Idea of the Video
This lecture explains the two contrasting philosophical ways of understanding human life that shape Paul Roberts’s narration:
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Life as Free Will (Captain of the Ship)
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Life as Inevitability (Log in the River)
Paul oscillates between these two views while narrating his past, and this tension governs his memory, guilt, and self-justification.
2. First View: Life as Free Will
Here, life is seen as a series of conscious choices:
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Every action is a choice that excludes other possibilities.
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Human beings are like captains steering their own ships.
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Whatever happens is the result of personal decision and responsibility.
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Paul sometimes views his love for Susan as an act of free will — something he chose consciously and therefore does not regret, even if it caused suffering.
This view supports responsibility, agency, and moral accountability.
3. Second View: Life as Inevitability
In contrast, Paul also presents life as something beyond personal control:
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Humans are like bumps on a log drifting in a river.
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Life is shaped by coincidence, circumstance, and unconscious forces.
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Events appear unavoidable — things simply “happen” to people.
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Paul often uses this view to suggest that his relationship with Susan was inevitable, shaped by chance meetings, age, tennis pairing, and circumstances beyond his control.
This view reduces personal responsibility.
4. Paul’s Oscillation and Self-Serving Memory
Paul admits that:
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When life goes well, people claim free will.
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When life goes badly, people claim inevitability.
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Memory rearranges events in self-serving ways to protect the ego.
Thus, Paul’s narration constantly shifts between agency and helplessness, revealing his unreliable memory and emotional evasions.
5. Why This Idea Is Important
This philosophical duality becomes a key interpretative lens for:
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Paul’s guilt and self-defence
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His abandonment of Susan
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His failure to take responsibility
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The novel’s exploration of choice, fate, memory, and moral accountability
1. Central Concern of the Video
Who is responsible for the damage, suffering, and tragedy that followed this love?
2. Paul’s Initial Displacement of Responsibility
At first, Paul places the blame mainly on Gordon Macleod (Susan’s husband):
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Gordon’s domestic violence is presented as the cause that pushed Susan into Paul’s arms.
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Paul insists Gordon’s guilt is absolute and unquestionable.
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He repeatedly treats himself as a rescuer, not a contributor to the disaster.
This allows Paul to view himself as morally innocent.
3. Barnes’s Chain-of-Responsibility Metaphor
Borrowed from The Sense of an Ending, Barnes introduces a chain metaphor:
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Every human life is part of a long chain of causes and effects.
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Damage does not come from a single person — it travels through a chain.
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A broken link cannot see the whole chain, so it wrongly blames only the nearest link.
This metaphor suggests that Paul is also a damaging link, even if he cannot initially see it.
4. Shift from Blame to Self-Interrogation
Gradually, Paul realises:
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His actions shattered not only Susan but also:
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Her daughters
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His parents
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His own future
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He begins to doubt his earlier certainty about Gordon being the only guilty party.
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He acknowledges the limits of assigning blame based only on personal memory.
5. Barnes’s Ethical Message
The novel finally suggests:
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True moral responsibility begins with self-examination, not accusation.
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Public blame is easy; private accountability is difficult.
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In introspection, one must ask:
How did I contribute to the damage — even unintentionally?
Thus, the novel becomes an ethical lesson in maturity, guilt, remorse, and responsibility.
6. Why This Matters
This theme connects directly to:
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Memory
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Self-justification
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Unreliable narration
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Moral growth
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The tragedy of belated understanding
1. Memory is Not Truth — It is Self-Serving Reconstruction
Explanation (Paragraph)
The Only Story presents memory not as a faithful record of the past but as a fragile, selective, and self-protective reconstruction. Paul does not merely remember his life; he reshapes it to survive emotionally. His narration reveals how memory rearranges events to reduce guilt and justify personal choices. As an old man, Paul revisits his past not to seek truth but to preserve a version of himself he can live with. Thus, memory in the novel becomes a personal courtroom where Paul is both the accused and his own defence lawyer.
Key Points
Examples from the Novel
Significance
Understanding this idea is essential because it transforms the novel from a simple love story into a psychological and moral inquiry. Paul becomes not just a victim of circumstances but an unreliable narrator whose memory itself becomes the main site of conflict.
2. Love as Damage Rather Than Fulfilment
Explanation (Paragraph)
Julian Barnes dismantles the romantic myth of love by presenting it as an emotionally destructive force rather than a healing one. Love in The Only Story does not complete individuals; instead, it leaves them permanently wounded. Both Paul and Susan suffer long-term psychological damage due to their relationship. Love becomes a source of dependency, trauma, guilt, and emotional disintegration rather than happiness.
Key Points
Examples from the Novel
Significance
This idea explains the tragic tone of the novel and reveals why the narrative never resolves into emotional closure. Barnes challenges the reader to reconsider the cultural glorification of romantic love.
3. The Inescapability of Moral Responsibility
Explanation (Paragraph)
A central philosophical concern of the novel is whether individuals can escape responsibility for the damage they cause. Paul frequently attempts to blame Gordon, fate, or inevitability for Susan’s suffering. However, Barnes gradually exposes these explanations as evasions. The narrative moves toward a belated moral awakening where Paul recognises that his choices — even if emotionally justified — contributed to Susan’s collapse.
Key Points
Examples from the Novel
Significance
This theme transforms the novel into a moral confession rather than a romantic memoir, making Paul’s story ethically complex and deeply introspective.
CHARACTER ANALYSIS
Paul Roberts
Paragraph
Paul Roberts functions as narrator, confessor, and moral subject of the novel. His voice shapes the entire narrative and determines what the reader sees and does not see. Emotionally immature in youth and morally burdened in old age, Paul narrates his love affair with Susan as both a justification and a confession. His fragmented narration exposes his guilt, self-deception, and delayed self-awareness.
Points
Susan Macleod
Paragraph
Susan is the emotional centre of the novel and its most tragic figure. She is a woman shaped by childhood trauma, marital violence, and emotional neglect. Her relationship with Paul offers temporary escape but ultimately accelerates her psychological decline. Existing only through Paul’s memory, Susan remains voiceless, highlighting her victimisation and emotional invisibility.
Points
Narrative Techniques in The Only Story
First-Person Narration and Its Limitations
Julian Barnes tells the entire story through the voice of Paul Roberts, a seventy-year-old man recollecting a love affair from his youth. While first-person narration usually creates intimacy, here it also introduces deep limitations. Paul controls what is revealed and what is concealed. The reader never gains direct access to Susan’s inner life; we see her only through Paul’s emotionally filtered memory. This restricted viewpoint highlights how personal narratives often hide as much as they reveal. Paul’s version of events therefore cannot be accepted as objective truth — it is shaped by guilt, regret, and self-protection.
Shifting Perspectives and the Unreliable Narrator
Although Paul is the sole narrator, the novel constantly shifts between first, second, and third person narration. This unusual movement fragments Paul’s identity and exposes his psychological instability. The shifting voice mirrors his attempts to distance himself from painful memories. He often narrates his own past actions as if he were a stranger, suggesting denial and emotional dissociation. His contradictions, evasions, and repeated self-justifications establish him as a deeply unreliable narrator whose memory is shaped by emotional necessity rather than truth.
Non-Linear Timeline and Flashbacks
The novel does not follow chronological order. Instead, it moves between three temporal layers: Paul at seventy narrating, Paul at nineteen experiencing love, and Paul in his forties revisiting Susan for the last time. These repeated temporal jumps mirror the workings of memory — fragmented, repetitive, and selective. Barnes shows that memory does not move forward logically but circles around emotional wounds, returning again and again to unresolved guilt and regret.
Impact on the Reader
These narrative techniques force the reader into an active interpretative role. Since Paul cannot be fully trusted, the reader must infer meaning from contradictions, silences, and emotional residues. The novel thus becomes less about what happened and more about how it is remembered. The reader becomes a moral judge, reconstructing truth from a broken narrative.
How This Narrative Differs from Conventional Novels
Unlike traditional novels that provide a linear, objective account, The Only Story offers no stable truth. There is no omniscient narrator, no clear moral closure, and no definitive version of events. Barnes replaces plot certainty with psychological complexity, turning the novel into a philosophical meditation rather than a conventional love story.
Thematic Connections
Memory and Unreliability
The novel presents memory as deeply subjective and emotionally selective. Paul’s memory is not a recording device but a defence mechanism. He alters the past to reduce guilt and preserve self-image. As a result, truth within the narrative remains unstable, making memory itself the central conflict of the novel.
Love, Passion, and Suffering (Lacanian Connection)
Barnes presents love not as fulfilment but as lack and damage. Lacan’s theory suggests that desire arises from absence rather than completion — love seeks what cannot be fully possessed. Paul and Susan’s relationship illustrates this: both are emotionally incomplete, and instead of healing each other, their union intensifies suffering. Love becomes addiction, trauma, and loss rather than harmony.
Responsibility and Cowardice
Paul repeatedly avoids moral responsibility by blaming Gordon, fate, and inevitability. His cowardice appears in his physical flight from conflict, his emotional abandonment of Susan, and his delayed moral reckoning. The consequence is lifelong guilt and emotional isolation — he survives, but he never heals.
Critique of Marriage
Barnes challenges marriage as a hollow social structure that suppresses emotional truth. Susan remains in a violent marriage due to social respectability. Paul’s parents’ emotionally empty relationship further exposes marriage as routine, complacency, and endurance rather than love.
Two Ways to Look at Life
Personal Reflection
At the very opening of The Only Story, Julian Barnes places before us a deceptively simple but philosophically unsettling question:
“Would you rather love the more and suffer the more, or love the less and suffer the less?”
This question becomes the emotional and moral backbone of the entire novel. Paul’s life functions as a living answer to it. He chooses to love deeply, irrationally, and absolutely — and in doing so, he inherits lifelong suffering. His love for Susan does not end with separation; instead, it lingers as memory, guilt, remorse, and emotional paralysis. Barnes shows that intense love is not something that can be neatly concluded or emotionally closed. It wounds, reshapes identity, and follows the lover across decades. Through Paul, the novel suggests that loving deeply is not merely a phase of youth — it becomes a permanent psychological condition that shapes one’s entire emotional life.
What makes this question more disturbing is that the novel does not offer comfort. It does not glorify suffering as noble, nor does it present emotional restraint as wisdom. Instead, it exposes a painful paradox: deep love gives life meaning, yet it simultaneously destroys emotional peace. Barnes forces us to confront the truth that the same love that fills our life with purpose can also leave behind lasting emotional scars.
My Reflection
For me, this question feels uncomfortably honest because it mirrors real emotional experience.
We are often taught to believe that love should make us stronger, happier, and more complete. Yet Barnes presents love as something that can also undo us — something that may permanently fracture our emotional stability. Paul’s life reveals that once a person has loved deeply, they cannot return to emotional neutrality. Even when relationships end, their emotional imprint remains within us, quietly shaping our fears, expectations, and attachments.
I believe that loving more — even at the risk of suffering — is closer to human truth. Loving less may protect us from heartbreak, but it also limits our capacity to feel deeply, to grow emotionally, and to experience genuine connection. Emotional safety may preserve comfort, but it can also produce emotional emptiness and emotional isolation.
At the same time, the novel also offers a crucial warning: love without responsibility, courage, and emotional presence can become destructive. Paul’s suffering is not caused only by loving deeply; it is intensified by his failure to stand by his love when it demanded moral courage. This complicates Barnes’s opening question. It is not merely about how much we love, but how responsibly we love.
Concluding Thought
The Only Story does not answer Barnes’s opening question for us — instead, it compels us to live with it. It reminds us that love is never emotionally neutral. Whether we choose to love more or less, we are choosing a particular form of suffering, growth, and self-definition.
Perhaps the deepest lesson of the novel is this:
Creative Response
A Journal Entry by Susan Macleod
I sometimes wonder when my life began to feel like something that was merely happening to me, rather than something I was living.
I was once a woman who laughed easily. I remember that much. I remember tennis afternoons, the sound of applause, the feeling of being admired, being seen. Then came the slow narrowing of things — the quiet shrinking of my world inside a marriage that asked me to be grateful while it bruised me. Gordon said he loved me. Perhaps he did, in his way. But love that frightens you is not love — it is endurance.
Then Paul appeared.
He looked at me as if I still existed. As if I was more than a tired wife, more than a woman surviving her days. With him, I felt light again. I felt possible. I told myself it was happiness. I did not realise it was also the beginning of another kind of dependence.
I needed him. More than I should have.
I built my strength around his presence, and when he grew tired — when his life began to move forward and mine could not — I felt myself begin to slip. Slowly, quietly. Like a woman losing her balance in a room no one is watching.
I do not blame him. I do not forgive him either. Some loves do not leave us with anger — they leave us with erosion.
If I could speak now, I would tell him this:
Love is not what destroys us.
It is what we lean on when we have already begun to fall.
And I am still falling.
THE ONLY STORY AS A PREDICTION OF MODERN RELATIONSHIP CRISIS
Modern Loneliness Proves Barnes Right
Despite record-high dating access, the WHO has declared loneliness a global health crisis (2023).
Meaning: we have more love opportunities — but less emotional endurance.
We love more easily. We stay less responsibly.
Modern Love Has Shifted from “Bond” to “Experience”
This cultural shift directly explains Paul’s behaviour:
Therefore: Paul is not morally abnormal — he is culturally predictive.
Digital Love Has Created Emotional Cowardice
Modern dating apps like Tinder, Bumble, and Hinge offer endless romantic choices. According to psychologist Barry Schwartz’s Paradox of Choice, unlimited options do not increase happiness — they reduce commitment and increase dissatisfaction. When partners become easily replaceable, emotional responsibility weakens.
The Illusion of Easy Emotional Detachment
The Novel as a Warning
The Only Story functions as a quiet warning to contemporary society. It suggests that avoiding emotional risk does not free us from suffering — it merely postpones it. The novel reminds us that deep love may wound us, but emotional avoidance may hollow us.
Conclusion
Barad, Dilip. “The Only Story - Julian Barnes.” Dilip Barad | Teacher Blog, https://blog.dilipbarad.com/2022/02/the-only-story.html. Accessed 8 February 2025.
Barnes, Julian. The Only Story. Jonathan Cape, 2018.
Barad, Dilip. (2020). EXPLORING NARRATIVE PATTERNS IN JULIAN BARNES' "THE ONLY STORY". 6. 179-188. 10.13140/RG.2.2.16090.93125. Accessed 9 February 2025. Accessed 9 February 2025.
Barad, Dilip. (2021). SYMBOLISM OF CROSSWORD PUZZLES: ORDER, INTELLECT, AND EXISTENTIAL RESPITE IN JULIAN BARNES'S 'THE ONLY STORY. 10.13140/RG.2.2.36223.59042. Accessed 9 February 2025.
Introduction | Character | Plot Summary | The Only Story | Julian Barnes." DoE-MKBU, YouTube, 31 Jan 2022, https://youtu.be/46Lxx-C5Tg0?si=PTkqNdhioisd9Tdv
"Joan | Character Study | The Only Story | Julian Barnes." DoE-MKBU, YouTube, 3 Feb 2022, https://youtu.be/st-w_099Yr0?si=OCoRA4CEEaHpXWq8
"Memory Novel | Memory and History | Memory and Morality | The Only Story | Julian Barnes." DoE-MKBU, YouTube, 2 Feb 2022, https://youtu.be/H4yoNBCzrUs?si=Vxc5GQPJqnbOxsYE
"Narrative Pattern | The Only Story | Julian Barnes." DoE-MKBU, YouTube, 1 Feb 2022, https://youtu.be/395rhgkig1w?si=mqvmqwWBRqOxByZ_
"Theme of Love | Passion and Suffering | The Only Story | Julian Barnes." DoE-MKBU, YouTube, 2 Feb 2022, https://youtu.be/7f7hCKtGkGI?si=gCVaaKw0ksJAn4OY
"Theme of Marriage | Critique of Marriage Institution | The Only Story | Julian Barnes." DoE-MKBU, YouTube, 3 Feb 2022, https://youtu.be/SCrSyV2jXzI?si=iLvkpeE_LlO67jpC
"Question of Responsibility | The Only Story | Julian Barnes." DoE-MKBU, YouTube3 Feb 2022, https://youtu.be/uBj-ju4RuTo?si=LW1K02vT0oNaw2Fx
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