The Sense of an Ending by Julian Barnes

Arushi Prasad
Aug 27, 2017 · 3 min read

The tile of the story is quite apt in how the ending is quite the hero of the book. Not to say that the rest of the story is insipid. On the contrary it is as (un)interesting as your life and mine, and in all sincerity i do not mean that as a jibe. It is the story of ordinary people and the occurrences in their lives narrated by Anthony or Tony Webster through over 50 years. The plot toys with vicissitudes of adolescence, awkwardness of youth, banality of middle age and well construed romanticism of one’s old age.

The story starts with the entry of Adrian into the lives of three friends at school and their increasing awe of him. This in my opinion we can all relate to as we’ve all had that one person in school or college we’ve all looked up to for the depth or originality of their thought. It’s quite amusing how the prototype of the kind of person we look up changes with age. Particularly, for me, while in junior school there wasn’t a type i cared about, at least consciously (maybe children do not really care about being “perfect”), towards the end of high school it was those kids who got through fancy engineering schools like IITs, BITS and NITs. In undergraduate college, the prototype was that of a “cool kid”, essentially someone who had had very different experiences from mine. This swiftly transformed into someone who was at the top of everything and eventually would get an “amazing job” in MBA school. However, now that person for me has transformed into someone who can hold on their own, who are stable, compassionate and sorted. “Sorted”, has become my most favorite word over the years. I don’t even know what you, me or the person in the cubicle next to yours at work is trying to sort. Who unsorted or complicated things in the first place if not you, me or that person? Are we just going around in circles complicating and sorting things?

Well coming back to the book, Tony’s experiences are ordinary in that they are extraordinary. His journey is quite trite as he has a normal childhood, college education, has affairs, marries, has a kid, gets divorces and now lives as banal an existence as anyone else. Something happens which takes him back to a time 40 years ago to when he tried his hand at love and failed. So much time has elapsed that his memory of what had transpired is quite abundantly tinted with missing details and what Tony wants to remember given his current life-state. Is this not true of all of us, that often we only want to remember details that paint us in a good light, that we twist historical facts to our favor, or just assume that we would’ve behaved the same way in the past that we would now. Or that we label people according to only how behaved with us. Alas, our subconscious and recorded evidence cannot be manipulated. And that is what happens with Tony. What he thought of Veronica, Adrian, Veronica’s mother was what he would’ve liked to think of them to justify his notions of them in the . Quite like us when we are looking for evidences in other peoples’ behaviors to justify our opinion of them.

As for the ending, i had to re-read it and even google to understand what actually happened (for someone who loves with the written word, i am quite dense to subtleties and inferences quite often). I am not going to be a spoilsport and tell you how it ends. So, go read it. It is 150 pages anyway. It has been made into a movie as well. If you’ve watched it let me know if it is worth a watch.

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