The Sense of an Ending

Respected sir,

              As my understanding I explain this novel. The Sense of an Ending is an open ended novel. The plot of the novel is psychological thriller. The title of the novel itself suggests something. The title is borrowed from a book of the same name by Frank Kermode’s “The Theory of Fiction”, it’s a non-fictional book. Primarily title suggests that narrator Tony being old and he recalls his past memory. Memory reconstructs the past, which we can also see in the novel The Old Man and the Sea. Tony recalls his youth days. It is said that Old people remains in past and young people remains in future. Like Tony he is being old so he always remains in his past memory. The novel is about Tony’s search of his self. Tony narrates the story. The novel leads postmodern time. We can’t understand postmodern novel without understanding the modern novel. Narrator’s technique is not easily understood. There is no beginning and no ending in postmodern novel. The writer of the novel Julian Barnes uses unreliable narrative technique. Here “Ending” suggests that there is no way of change, means once it happen than there is no change possible. We can’t change our past; we can just recall our past. Recalling our past is the ending of our sense, but not ending our life. Life is not end here but it’s changing. In old age we should do self-reliance. Tony is happy and independent in his old age. Nothing left in his life, there is satisfaction in his life. But how can one think that he or she satisfied with his or her life. There should be something left in life which cannot be fulfilled.

          The meaning of phrase ‘Blood Money’ in Veronica’s reply email is blood money as per Veronica, Sarah’s 500 pounds for the happiness she had with Adrian, Veronica sacrifices her happiness and takes care of mentally retarded Adrian, veronica as instinctive or manipulative, all his allegations for Veronica and Adrian came to be true for his own character, not only his ‘words’ in the letter to Adrian came to ‘life’, but what he said and thought and memorized as true history of survivor, proved to be limited interpretation of the events, it rather mirrored Tony’s true self to himself – leads to the deep introspection about oneself, when one passes judgments on others.

        Time plays very important role in the novel. Time holds us and also it moulds us. Tony recalls his past, his school days. In his school days there were no happy moments, but he made friend Adrian. Tony wants to be like Adrian, who is his role model. He is debating with his own self. He recalls many incidents of his past. But we know that we cannot remember everything, something remains deformed in our mind. So Tony himself is not sure about his narration that what he narrates is 100% true. Some events or incidents are leaving its traces in our life, some give happiness or some give pain. In school Tony and his friends are wears the watch with face on of wrist, it shows that they are hiding something or something they want to keep secret.

                About suicide of Adrian, Adrian had explained his reasoning of suicide in his letter: that life is a gift bestowed without anyone asking for it; that the thinking person has a philosophical duty to examine both the nature of life and the conditions it comes with; and that if this person decides to renounce the gift no one asks for, it is a moral and human duty to act on the consequences of that decision. Tony came to know that before Adrian’s death Adrian was happy, later he knows that before suicide Adrian lived with Sarah not with Veronica, so he thought that why Adrian was happy in his last days, because of Sarah.

        Here we can also see the complex of Eros and Thanatos. One is related with love, self-preservation and anther is related with death instinct and no meaning of life. There also many suicides are happen in the novel, like Robson’s suicide and Adrian’s suicide. We also connect the Thelma and Luicy complex with their suicide. Suicide is suggests that one is escape from responsibility or something. The last word of the novel “unrest” suggests that ending with rest, rest with self. Means we that we are happy and life ends happily but it is our illusion, ending is shattered.