Thinking Activity : Sense of an Ending

The novel in two parts, narrates almost similar events but from different perspectives. Surprisingly, perspectives are from Tony Webster’s conscious memory-recollection. Make an attempt to tell the story in linear narrative including events from both the parts of ‘The Sense of an Ending’. 


Sense of an Ending is a memory based novel, and also about past of some character that will revile by one mystery. So if we connect with history, than history always repeated but not same way. So in this novel we have character of Tony Webster that what done in past he can now repeat in his own way because he is the narrator of the story. If we talk about individual narration than all the character are the hero of their own story, so somewhere we can point out that Tony Webster is one of them. With the beginning of the novel it gave some kind of information that what will come in the novel, so with the starting of the novel Tony was thinking about all the part of the past. Tony knows everything about what happen in past but we don't know so starting few pages he reflects the some area of the past. Than he unfold the whole story of the novel. So in the beginning pages we find cache story. All the reflection of starting pages are unfolding later parts. Tony Webster tell only one story, but that story reflect in present time of the character. so both part are not similar but because of past and present narrative goes on the line we think both part are similar. 



"History is that certainty produced at the point where the imperfections of memory meet the inadequacies of documentation." How far can you agree with this definition of Adrian? Justify you answer with reference to your reading of ‘The Sense of an Ending’.

By now, The Sense of an Ending by Julian Barnes has gained itself a reputation for being the novel you must read twice. I read it twice, and so did the director of last year’s Man Booker Prize, which Barnes’ novel won to no surprise. The book’s plot reads like that of a thriller paperback: full of vengeful ex-girlfriends, youth suicide and illicit sex--though it's Barnes’ masochistically lyrical insights on loss and memory that drives this novel’s recruiting fan base to keep flipping back the pages.

The book centers on Tony Webster, an Englishman in his sixties, who is unexpectedly bequeathed the diary of Adrian, his childhood friend who had committed suicide forty years earlier. The will is from the late mother of his collegiate ex-girlfriend Veronica. Last he heard from her, she had ditched Tony for Adrian, and was presumably still Adrian’s girlfriend around the time his body was found behind a locked door, bled to death in a bathtub.

Why does Veronica’s mother have Adrian’s diary? And why did she want Tony, of all people, to have it? Tony suddenly finds himself mining his memory to find answers surrounding Adrian’s enigmatic suicide. His search lyrically reveals the weakness of memory as corroboration. These moments, rather than the book’s muscular plot, are where Barnes’ prose is strongest.

“History isn’t the lies of the victors . . . It’s more the memories of the survivors, most of whom are neither victorious nor defeated.” Justify this view of Tony Webster with the help of your reading of ‘The Sense of an Ending’. (Qtd. From pg 56)   

This line is perfect example between Tony and Adrian, one is alive with memory and another die with memory. There is one thing came up that tony is the survivor, and Adrian not. History is written by people or by memory. So Tony create history by his memory, and he can tell the story. Tony prove that history isn't the lies of the victors... but it's more about the memory of the survivors.

‘It is not about what we ‘do’, it is about how we ‘remember’ what we have done?’. Illustrate with reference to the novel ‘The Sense of an Ending’.

This point is reflection of the suicide scene. What Adrian remember is the reflection on his suicide, so with this accident Tony can remember this, because it is related with Tony. In our past we can not remember all the things, there are some accident that we can remember in our life, and Adrian's suicide is the accident that Tony remember. 

The Title – ‘The Sense of an Ending’.

The title deals with the entire book as the book opens; Tony is spending a good deal of his time thinking about his relationship with his school friend Adrian Finn, who committed suicide as a young man. Tony is Pooterishly content with his life and mediocrity, which he contrasts with Finn's burning and forensic intelligence. Even as a schoolboy, Finn demonstrated a precocious understanding of philosophy and history. He said that "he hates the way the English have of not being serious about being serious" – words quoted twice in the novel. This is a Barnesian theme too, lying behind much of his work, fiction and nonfiction, even when it is at its most playful.

Tony attended school in the 1960s, and many of his memories centre on him and his friends grappling with the new sexual freedoms. Not that these always arrived in their neck of the woods quite in time: one of their schoolmates killed himself after getting a girl pregnant. At the end of their school careers, Adrian Finn goes to Cambridge and Tony to Bristol, where he meets Veronica Ford. Veronica invites him to stay for a few days with her family in Chislehurst, and he feels himself to have been humiliated by her disdainful father and supercilious brother, both of whom are intimidatingly posh. But Veronica's mother, Sarah, takes to him, and even appears to offer him a mysterious warning about her daughter.

Tony Webster is in his mid-sixties when he receives a letter from a lawyer with an unusual bequest from the mother of Veronica, an ex-girlfriend of his from 40 years before. He is left some money and the diary of his old school chum Adrian. Veronica makes it impossible for Tony to acquire the diary so what follows is Tony's recollection of that period of his life.

          In the novel The Sense of an Ending the title plays vital role as the title itself suggests that the sense of an ending means here the question arises in our mind that whose ending is this? and secondly we can also say that according to the sense an individual can interpret the ending of this novel because here in the novel Julian Barnes has left us in thinking at the end of the novel therefore as per my reading it can be said that the ending of the novel is not clearly given or Barnes has deliberately done this to make reader thinking.