THE SENSE OF
AN ENDING
-Julian Barnes
The Sense of an Ending is
about the person’s memory of youthful days. The novella is divided into two
divisions. The divisions are entitled as Part1 and Part2. The first part begins
in the 1960s.It begins with four intellectually arrogant school friends. We are
told two friends out of four. The first one is Tony Webster who is the narrator
of the story and the second one is Adrian the most talented and intelligent
among four.
Julian Barnes here justifies
the Universal Truth that “One cannot know what he does not know” – with the
reference of Tony Webster that he never understand the words of Veronica, When
Tony asked Veronica bout the Money at that time she replied with very tragic
answer “Blood Money”. The central theme of the novel is weakness of memory.
Through the narrative of Tony Webster and his search for reason of Adrian’s
death tries to justify one thing that is imperfection of memory, how our
partial memory mislead us! Throughout the novel, writer tries to prove human
memory and how it creates assumption on human mind.
In the book, Tony Webster is
looking back on his life, or one particular arc of it, to do with a gifted
school friend, a girl, and an everyday tragedy. Tony is an interesting study:
retired, particular, clearly somewhat lonely: “I had wanted life not to bother
me too much, and had succeeded – and how pitiful that was.” His only regular
human contact is his ex-wife Margaret, with whom he continues to get on well:
indeed, she seems to be his only friend. She, with apparent disinterest, offers
him advice on what to do when his teenage experience with ex-girlfriend
Veronica starts to trouble him again. Why worry now about something that
happened forty years ago? Because it involves death, and Tony is not getting
any younger. And because the past is never dead; it is not even past.
The central character of the
book is not Veronica, or Adrian, though their actions are central to it. The
story is told by Tony and, as a consequence, is about Tony. He throws doubt on
his own reliability (which led me to trust him implicitly), questions his own
motives, and does his best to honor Adrian’s complaint from decades ago (which
I suspect also reflects Barnes’s view): “I hate the way the
English have of not being serious about being serious. I really hate it.”
The novel is open ended about
these two topics. Reason of Adrian’s suicide is not clearly given. But the
facts about his life, before his death is revealed. His philosophical,
existentialist ideas suggest that he was mature and serious about his way of
living. Like an existentialist, he was having anxiety and restlessness about
human life. So, these facts suggest that perhaps following his existentialist
mentality, he commits suicide. In their school days, one of their classmates
commits suicide because he made one girl pregnant. The reference of this story
strongly focuses on idea of Eros and Thanatos.
Even the novel ends
with revealing facts about Adrian’s sexual relationship with Mrs. Sarah Ford
quite before his suicide. It means, we can judge that, the writer may want to
say, even Adrian is mature serious and has philosophical ideas cannot escape
from very cheap trap of Eros and Thanatos. But we can also conclude against
that idea that, perhaps, Adrian’s relationship and following events are only
side kick of Adrian’s strong existentialist ideas on ending his life, the seed
of suicide are already there.
No comments:
Post a Comment