Please offer a quick response or thought for Amy and Hallie.
9 thoughts on “The Sense of an Ending”
Ty Carleton
Just to finish off the tangent started in class about the watch/wrist symbolism: Soon after Veronica convinces Tony to start wearing his watch on the proper side of his wrist, we as readers experience the time warp from Tony as a twentysomething to him as an old man. Perhaps Adrian’s refusal to ever wear his watch in the former fashion connotes that he never allowed himself to indulge in the frivolities that constitute childhood. His portrayal as a stoic introvert attests to this. I think we are meant to believe that his precocious insistence on taking everything so seriously was a factor in his suicide. This would imply, however, that all adults who have conformed to wearing their watches right-side out so to speak, are depressed. I think the book suggests that Tony would be depressed were it not for his memories of an earlier time when he allowed himself to dream and refused to conform to time’s ardent rush forward. After all, he wholly concedes the banality of his present life, but seems to find great solace in the narrative of his younger years his memory has crafted for him. Perhaps the saving grace of old age is the memory that one was once a child.
Hallie – I was really intrigued by your observations on the meta-narrative aspects of the work. I think it might be interesting to go more into the implications of that (if there’s anything more to be said…)?
I was really bothered by that moment when Tony declares that Adrian committed suicide because ‘he was afraid of the pram in the hall.’ I couldn’t quite figure out why just now, but I think it bothered me because it was Tony taking an extreme view of things again. Even though I sympathize with him almost throughout the novel, it annoys me that he swings so violently from one extreme to another once he finds out about Adrian’s affair with Sarah: he goes from hounding Veronica almost self-righteously to retreating and utterly blaming himself for how events transpired. With regard to Adrian’s suicide, he conceives of it as noble and morally courageous and then, upon finding out about the baby, reduces it to something utterly banal (‘the pram in the hall’. It seems to me that the truth probably lies somewhere in the middle for both. So even though the big plot revelation is supposed to be illuminating, I still don’t trust Tony’s interpretation of events in which he sees himself as almost wholly to blame. And I felt, at the end, that I still had very little idea of who Adrian was.
Amy: Just a quick note on the English grading system. 1sts and 2:1’s dont really correspond to the American GPA system in a neat way since they are designated (as far as I experienced) by one exam graded out of 100 and there is a wide range within each classification. A first is 70% or above on the exam for 2:1 i believe 63% is the cut off. (Other Emily correct me if im wrong) Regardless of exactly how the system works the novel makes it clear that Tony had to work incredibly hard to get a good but not brilliant mark, while Adrian had no trouble meeting his teachers and friends expectations that he would demonstrate his cleverness in the exam.
One moment in the text that perplexed me a bit leading off our discussion of history was when Tony and Veronica meet and she refuses to give him the journal and hands him the letter instead. She repeats multiple times “people shouldnt read other peoples diary’s” and then finally “But you can read this if you like” giving him back his own words, the part he played in the whole mess. It is as if it is acceptable for Tony to manufacture his own guilt and rehash his own perspective but unacceptable to scrounge historically and read what might give him insight into his friends thoughts. Or perhaps Veronica is just vindictive, since both she and her mother read the diary..
Amy- I thought your presentation was very helpful. To give you more perspective on the readability of the book, and reader reactions, I have a personal anecdote to share. I actually have been sharing a number of the books we have read for this class with my grandmother, so for her birthday I got her “The Sense of an Ending.” She loved it so much that she convinced her book group who, as far as I can tell from her description are overall not particularly sophisticated readers and never like anything, to read the book. She told me that everyone loved the book, and that they had the best discussion they had ever had. In fact, they loved it so much that the next book they are discussing is “Flaubert’s Parrot.” Part of what my grandmother says is so interesting about this book is its mass appeal– it is the rare book that so many readers, including my grandmother, mother, and aunt, all of whom have extremely different tastes, can enjoy. That being said, that does not necessarily mean that a novel is therefore worthy of winning a prize, but I thought it was a fascinating novel, and found that our discussion of it showed that while it is very readable, it also has some a rather complicated plot and raises some interesting questions.
Hallie- I thought your presentation was great as well, and the themes of time and memory are obviously everywhere in the book. One other example (or series of examples) connected to memory that you could also look at would be letters, because there are a couple of different times when he mentions having either sent or received a letter, tells about its contents, and then says he doesn’t have the actual letter anymore so he may not remember it totally correctly.
I’m not sure if this is what Ty meant by the “shiny wrist,” but didn’t the initial form of sex that Tony and Veronica shared consist of him taking his watch off and her rubbing against him? I think Margaret teased Tony about this later. Not sure what this means though…
We talked a lot about narrator reliability. Here’s a passage in which he confesses he might not be reliable.
48: “You might think this is rubbish–preachy, self-justificatory rubbish…and that all my conclusions are reversible…You might even ask me to apply my “theory” to myself and explain what damage I had suffered a long way back and what its consequences might be: for instance, how it might affect my reliability and truthfulness. I’m not sure I could answer this to be honest.”
Does the fact that he confesses his own unreliability make him more reliable?
I thought both of yesterday’s presentations were really helpful, as usual. Amy, I’m really glad you talked about the severn bore. I just spent ten really enjoyable minutes watching YouTube videos of it. And Hallie, I think it fits in nicely with your discussion of time and memory. My sense of the way that it works in the novel is as a physical, symbolic representation of the process of remembering. We, like the river, live our daily lives in one direction, flowing toward the future. At times, we allow ourselves (or are forced) to remember, to go back, like the water in the river, to somewhere that we should have already left behind. The problem is, as both you and Tony pointed out, memory is fallible, so our second (or third, fourth…) time returning to a memory is distorted and a bit eerie, like the severn bore: “it looked and felt quietly wrong, as if…nature were reversed, and time with it” (39). If you decide to include this, I think it’d be interesting to consider why Tony “forgets” that Veronica was with him that night until late in the novel. He claims that night is the “one single, distinct event” that he remembers from his college days, but he forgets a significant detail. More evidence of his unreliability, for sure, but I think there’s a lot more to it that might be interesting for you to look into.
Amy, your presentation really helped me get a sense of Barnes as an author. I thought it was great to know that Julian has written a number of books as Dan Kavanogh. I’m not sure if you already covered this in your presentation but apparently he got this pen name from his wife, Pat Kavanagh who is also his literary agent. I thought it was interesting that Pat Kavanogh left Barnes for an affair with another offer but eventually returned to her marriage with Barnes.
Hallie, your discussion of The Sense of an Ending as meta-literature was fascinating. Talking about the theme of memory, like Meaghan above, I thought Severn Bore reflects the act of remembering and facing the reality of the past. Adding to it, I thought that the “accumulation” of experience through time also allows Tony to really remember and face the truths from his past, as well as altering his perception of his own life altogether.
Amy, I seriously want to read one of those Duffy books. Like, seriously enough that I’ve been looking to try and find places I can actually buy the damn things without having to pay exorbitant amounts of money, but no luck so far. Still, a bisexual ex-cop who solves crime whose name is also Duffy, written by the alter ego of Julian Barnes? How can that not be awesome?
Hallie, like Jae above, I really quite enjoyed thinking about The Sense of an Ending as meta-literature. I was wondering, though–what does that mean for the beginning being a piecemeal list through time? Another question that brought up for me–it’s hard to place exactly when some of the “asides” occur. For instance, when does that very first page take place? Post-revelation, post-Veronica part 2, or before?
Another thought–you mentioned that he was haunted by the tiny imperfections of memory. Does that have any link to the accumulation theory mentioned by Adrian?
I hope you can all forgive my belatedness and lapse in memory. After this course, I’ve come to realize that such lapses are only natural and make for Booker Prize winning stories. Kidding, obviously, but all jokes aside, I apologize for my lateness and hope that this can come in handy at least for anyone writing their final papers on the novel.
I wanted to think a little more about how memory and rediscovery changes our ideas of what’s honorable (or not). Throughout the novel, it seemed as though there was a stark contrast between Adrian’s suicide and their classmate’s. Their classmate’s suicide was banal, boring, gossip. He could not handle having a baby. Okay, moving on. Adrian’s struck everyone as stoic, well thought out, methodical, otherworldly. Even when Tony pushes every other emotion and memory aside, the thought of Adrian still crops up. Until Veronica’s mother sends him on his late quest to find “the truth,” in whatever form that is, Tony thinks of Adrian in only intellectual terms. He returns to the suicide with interest and with awe, almost with jealousy for the pure legitimacy of it as it seems to him. Adrian did something with his life. He took it seriously, and he took it away. Tony, on the other hand, spent his life pulling back and pulling away, protecting himself from Adrian’s fate.
In the end, though, Adrian’s death becomes an actual tragedy, because it was not particularly honorable at all. He fooled everyone, certainly, but his reasons turned out to be based more on the consequences of the wild whims of youth than on the deep intellectual reasoning that he based his image upon. Tony, without these whims, Tony, who always plays it safe and admits that after his brief stint in California post-Veronica—after the period when he toyed with irresponsibility—he came back and settled into what he wanted to be a “peaceable” and mature life. Looking back, he realizes, “We thought we were being mature when we were only being safe. We imagined we were being responsible but were only being cowardly. What we called realism turned out to be a way of avoiding things rather than facing them.” He clearly has a problem with this lifestyle and he feels disappointed by the way things turned out, but it seems as though Adrian’s route is the only other option left, and in the end it also seems like a cowardly option. Tony certainly puts his toe tentatively in the water, trying to live life more fully by seeking out Veronica, driving around town, waiting in the bar until he can put together the pieces of his life that he lost by being emotionally reserved, but even then he does not get it. When he finally does understand, there is no where else to go, really.
He changes to some degree from all of this, I think, despite his continued lack of interest—inability?–in deepening his emotions. I think we see this most clearly in the end of his relationship to Margaret. She ends it, and he does not go back to her for safety, which is something I believe he would have done previously. He tries, for once, to seek out trouble and rekindle if not old romance, than at least old emotion. Granted, the letter Veronica sends him leads him into this forcibly, but it still leads him to make the most emotional commentary he makes throughout the book, almost a la Disgrace. He actually has many of the same emotionally-removed but grasping-at-something type thoughts that Lurie has, trying to resolve, feel deeply—and badly—about the situation, and push it away intellectually all at once. We feel more sympathy for Tony, certainly, because he ends as a poor old man searching for a legitimacy he cannot find, but at least he sort of seems to get it at the end, even if he does not know what to do with it. I find it hard to say whether this is a victory—he uncovers the secret!—or a total tragedy: he figures it out and there is still nothing left.
Just to finish off the tangent started in class about the watch/wrist symbolism: Soon after Veronica convinces Tony to start wearing his watch on the proper side of his wrist, we as readers experience the time warp from Tony as a twentysomething to him as an old man. Perhaps Adrian’s refusal to ever wear his watch in the former fashion connotes that he never allowed himself to indulge in the frivolities that constitute childhood. His portrayal as a stoic introvert attests to this. I think we are meant to believe that his precocious insistence on taking everything so seriously was a factor in his suicide. This would imply, however, that all adults who have conformed to wearing their watches right-side out so to speak, are depressed. I think the book suggests that Tony would be depressed were it not for his memories of an earlier time when he allowed himself to dream and refused to conform to time’s ardent rush forward. After all, he wholly concedes the banality of his present life, but seems to find great solace in the narrative of his younger years his memory has crafted for him. Perhaps the saving grace of old age is the memory that one was once a child.
Hallie – I was really intrigued by your observations on the meta-narrative aspects of the work. I think it might be interesting to go more into the implications of that (if there’s anything more to be said…)?
I was really bothered by that moment when Tony declares that Adrian committed suicide because ‘he was afraid of the pram in the hall.’ I couldn’t quite figure out why just now, but I think it bothered me because it was Tony taking an extreme view of things again. Even though I sympathize with him almost throughout the novel, it annoys me that he swings so violently from one extreme to another once he finds out about Adrian’s affair with Sarah: he goes from hounding Veronica almost self-righteously to retreating and utterly blaming himself for how events transpired. With regard to Adrian’s suicide, he conceives of it as noble and morally courageous and then, upon finding out about the baby, reduces it to something utterly banal (‘the pram in the hall’. It seems to me that the truth probably lies somewhere in the middle for both. So even though the big plot revelation is supposed to be illuminating, I still don’t trust Tony’s interpretation of events in which he sees himself as almost wholly to blame. And I felt, at the end, that I still had very little idea of who Adrian was.
Amy: Just a quick note on the English grading system. 1sts and 2:1’s dont really correspond to the American GPA system in a neat way since they are designated (as far as I experienced) by one exam graded out of 100 and there is a wide range within each classification. A first is 70% or above on the exam for 2:1 i believe 63% is the cut off. (Other Emily correct me if im wrong) Regardless of exactly how the system works the novel makes it clear that Tony had to work incredibly hard to get a good but not brilliant mark, while Adrian had no trouble meeting his teachers and friends expectations that he would demonstrate his cleverness in the exam.
One moment in the text that perplexed me a bit leading off our discussion of history was when Tony and Veronica meet and she refuses to give him the journal and hands him the letter instead. She repeats multiple times “people shouldnt read other peoples diary’s” and then finally “But you can read this if you like” giving him back his own words, the part he played in the whole mess. It is as if it is acceptable for Tony to manufacture his own guilt and rehash his own perspective but unacceptable to scrounge historically and read what might give him insight into his friends thoughts. Or perhaps Veronica is just vindictive, since both she and her mother read the diary..
Amy- I thought your presentation was very helpful. To give you more perspective on the readability of the book, and reader reactions, I have a personal anecdote to share. I actually have been sharing a number of the books we have read for this class with my grandmother, so for her birthday I got her “The Sense of an Ending.” She loved it so much that she convinced her book group who, as far as I can tell from her description are overall not particularly sophisticated readers and never like anything, to read the book. She told me that everyone loved the book, and that they had the best discussion they had ever had. In fact, they loved it so much that the next book they are discussing is “Flaubert’s Parrot.” Part of what my grandmother says is so interesting about this book is its mass appeal– it is the rare book that so many readers, including my grandmother, mother, and aunt, all of whom have extremely different tastes, can enjoy. That being said, that does not necessarily mean that a novel is therefore worthy of winning a prize, but I thought it was a fascinating novel, and found that our discussion of it showed that while it is very readable, it also has some a rather complicated plot and raises some interesting questions.
Hallie- I thought your presentation was great as well, and the themes of time and memory are obviously everywhere in the book. One other example (or series of examples) connected to memory that you could also look at would be letters, because there are a couple of different times when he mentions having either sent or received a letter, tells about its contents, and then says he doesn’t have the actual letter anymore so he may not remember it totally correctly.
Miss you all already!
I’m not sure if this is what Ty meant by the “shiny wrist,” but didn’t the initial form of sex that Tony and Veronica shared consist of him taking his watch off and her rubbing against him? I think Margaret teased Tony about this later. Not sure what this means though…
We talked a lot about narrator reliability. Here’s a passage in which he confesses he might not be reliable.
48: “You might think this is rubbish–preachy, self-justificatory rubbish…and that all my conclusions are reversible…You might even ask me to apply my “theory” to myself and explain what damage I had suffered a long way back and what its consequences might be: for instance, how it might affect my reliability and truthfulness. I’m not sure I could answer this to be honest.”
Does the fact that he confesses his own unreliability make him more reliable?
I thought both of yesterday’s presentations were really helpful, as usual. Amy, I’m really glad you talked about the severn bore. I just spent ten really enjoyable minutes watching YouTube videos of it. And Hallie, I think it fits in nicely with your discussion of time and memory. My sense of the way that it works in the novel is as a physical, symbolic representation of the process of remembering. We, like the river, live our daily lives in one direction, flowing toward the future. At times, we allow ourselves (or are forced) to remember, to go back, like the water in the river, to somewhere that we should have already left behind. The problem is, as both you and Tony pointed out, memory is fallible, so our second (or third, fourth…) time returning to a memory is distorted and a bit eerie, like the severn bore: “it looked and felt quietly wrong, as if…nature were reversed, and time with it” (39). If you decide to include this, I think it’d be interesting to consider why Tony “forgets” that Veronica was with him that night until late in the novel. He claims that night is the “one single, distinct event” that he remembers from his college days, but he forgets a significant detail. More evidence of his unreliability, for sure, but I think there’s a lot more to it that might be interesting for you to look into.
Amy, your presentation really helped me get a sense of Barnes as an author. I thought it was great to know that Julian has written a number of books as Dan Kavanogh. I’m not sure if you already covered this in your presentation but apparently he got this pen name from his wife, Pat Kavanagh who is also his literary agent. I thought it was interesting that Pat Kavanogh left Barnes for an affair with another offer but eventually returned to her marriage with Barnes.
Hallie, your discussion of The Sense of an Ending as meta-literature was fascinating. Talking about the theme of memory, like Meaghan above, I thought Severn Bore reflects the act of remembering and facing the reality of the past. Adding to it, I thought that the “accumulation” of experience through time also allows Tony to really remember and face the truths from his past, as well as altering his perception of his own life altogether.
Amy, I seriously want to read one of those Duffy books. Like, seriously enough that I’ve been looking to try and find places I can actually buy the damn things without having to pay exorbitant amounts of money, but no luck so far. Still, a bisexual ex-cop who solves crime whose name is also Duffy, written by the alter ego of Julian Barnes? How can that not be awesome?
Hallie, like Jae above, I really quite enjoyed thinking about The Sense of an Ending as meta-literature. I was wondering, though–what does that mean for the beginning being a piecemeal list through time? Another question that brought up for me–it’s hard to place exactly when some of the “asides” occur. For instance, when does that very first page take place? Post-revelation, post-Veronica part 2, or before?
Another thought–you mentioned that he was haunted by the tiny imperfections of memory. Does that have any link to the accumulation theory mentioned by Adrian?
I hope you can all forgive my belatedness and lapse in memory. After this course, I’ve come to realize that such lapses are only natural and make for Booker Prize winning stories. Kidding, obviously, but all jokes aside, I apologize for my lateness and hope that this can come in handy at least for anyone writing their final papers on the novel.
I wanted to think a little more about how memory and rediscovery changes our ideas of what’s honorable (or not). Throughout the novel, it seemed as though there was a stark contrast between Adrian’s suicide and their classmate’s. Their classmate’s suicide was banal, boring, gossip. He could not handle having a baby. Okay, moving on. Adrian’s struck everyone as stoic, well thought out, methodical, otherworldly. Even when Tony pushes every other emotion and memory aside, the thought of Adrian still crops up. Until Veronica’s mother sends him on his late quest to find “the truth,” in whatever form that is, Tony thinks of Adrian in only intellectual terms. He returns to the suicide with interest and with awe, almost with jealousy for the pure legitimacy of it as it seems to him. Adrian did something with his life. He took it seriously, and he took it away. Tony, on the other hand, spent his life pulling back and pulling away, protecting himself from Adrian’s fate.
In the end, though, Adrian’s death becomes an actual tragedy, because it was not particularly honorable at all. He fooled everyone, certainly, but his reasons turned out to be based more on the consequences of the wild whims of youth than on the deep intellectual reasoning that he based his image upon. Tony, without these whims, Tony, who always plays it safe and admits that after his brief stint in California post-Veronica—after the period when he toyed with irresponsibility—he came back and settled into what he wanted to be a “peaceable” and mature life. Looking back, he realizes, “We thought we were being mature when we were only being safe. We imagined we were being responsible but were only being cowardly. What we called realism turned out to be a way of avoiding things rather than facing them.” He clearly has a problem with this lifestyle and he feels disappointed by the way things turned out, but it seems as though Adrian’s route is the only other option left, and in the end it also seems like a cowardly option. Tony certainly puts his toe tentatively in the water, trying to live life more fully by seeking out Veronica, driving around town, waiting in the bar until he can put together the pieces of his life that he lost by being emotionally reserved, but even then he does not get it. When he finally does understand, there is no where else to go, really.
He changes to some degree from all of this, I think, despite his continued lack of interest—inability?–in deepening his emotions. I think we see this most clearly in the end of his relationship to Margaret. She ends it, and he does not go back to her for safety, which is something I believe he would have done previously. He tries, for once, to seek out trouble and rekindle if not old romance, than at least old emotion. Granted, the letter Veronica sends him leads him into this forcibly, but it still leads him to make the most emotional commentary he makes throughout the book, almost a la Disgrace. He actually has many of the same emotionally-removed but grasping-at-something type thoughts that Lurie has, trying to resolve, feel deeply—and badly—about the situation, and push it away intellectually all at once. We feel more sympathy for Tony, certainly, because he ends as a poor old man searching for a legitimacy he cannot find, but at least he sort of seems to get it at the end, even if he does not know what to do with it. I find it hard to say whether this is a victory—he uncovers the secret!—or a total tragedy: he figures it out and there is still nothing left.
Also, check this out: http://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2011/12/the-best-books-we-read-this-year/249651/
There’s potential the aggressive and forgotten letter was based on a more personal experience.