Click Here to Evaluation of My Assignment
Name:- Gohel Ankita
Kishorbhai
Std:- M.As
Sem:-4
Roll no:- 12
Paper no:- 13( The New Literature)
Topic:- The Major Themes in ' The Sense of an Ending'.
Submitted to:- Department of English, Mahahraja Krishnakumarsinhji
University.
Year:- 2015-2017
Julian Barnes was born in Leicester in 1946. His recent publication. The Sense
of an ending won the 2011 Man Booker Prize. He won many prestigious awards—
-
The Prix Medias
-
The Prix Famine
-
Somerset Maugham Prize
-
E. M. Foster Award
-
David Cohen Prize for Literature
About the text:
“The book’s plot read like that a thriller paperback, full of vengeful ex-
girlfriends youth suicide and illicit sex.”
Geoff Mak
“The Sense of an Ending looks
at the ways in which people distort or tailor the past in an effort to
mythologize their own lives.”
Michiko Kakutani
The Sense of an Ending: a grey, grim near-perfect novella whose title ,borrowed
from Frank Kermode’s 1967 classic of literary criticism, suggests a creative
extrapolation of the volumes thesis. Since we are born into the middle of
things, suggested Kermode, the stories we tell about ourselves serve as consolatory
structures, falsifying origins and ends to grant order and meaning to that
which has none.
The Sense of an Ending refers to the way in which character’s relations end
messily, whether through thwarted love or actual lives cut short by their own
hand it might allude the reader’s expectations of how this tale will reach a
conclusion.
Summary in brief
The novel is divided into two parts, entitled ‘one’ and ‘two’, both of which
are narrated by Tony Webster when ha is retired and living alone. The first
part begins in the 1960s with four intellectually arrogant school friends of
whom two features in the remainder of the story; Tony, the narrator, and
Adrian, the most precociously intelligent of the four. Towards the end of their
school days another boy at the school hangs himself, apparently after getting a
girl pregnant. The four friends discuss the philosophical difficulty of knowing
exactly what happened. Adrian goes to Cambridge University and Tony
to Bristol University. Tony acquires a girlfriend. Veronica, at whose family
home he spends an awkward weekend. Their relationship fails in some acrimony.
In his final year at university Tony receives a letter from Adrian informing
him that he is going out with Veronica. Tony replies to the letter. Some months
later, he is told that Adrin has committed suicide leaving a note addressed to
the corner saying that the thinking person has a philosophical duty to examine
the nature of their life, and may then chose to renounce it. Tony admires the
following. He briefly recounts the following uneventful forty years of his life
until his sixties. At this point Tony’s narration of the second part of the
novel-which is twice as long as the first- begins, with the arrival of a lawyer’s
500 pounds and two documents. These lead him to re-establish contact with
Veronica and after a number of meetings with her, to re-evaluate the story he
has narrated in the first part.
Main Characters
The number of characters are not many in this complex novel but the
relationship of the characters are quit complicated in the way they behave in
the novel. Some of they main characters in ‘The sense of an ending’ are—
1) Tony Webster
Tony is the narrator of the novel. He is retired arts administrator and lives
alone. Tony is at the centre of the novel around whom the other characters are
revealed. Tony’s life is stormed with many memories of his past 40 years. In
second part of the novel he re-evaluates the first part of his novel. When he
receives some amount and document from his ex-girl friend’s mother, he
re-established contact with Veronica and tries to solve the puzzling questions.
After meeting Veronica Tony evaluates his first narrated story. He makes some
conscious observations about class, sex, repression and intellectuality. Tony,
when narrated, had a daughter and grand-children. One cannot completely trust
his memory because at the age of sixty all events of past cannot be recalled as
what truely happened. Tony’s narration can be called unreliable.
2) Veronica Ford
She is spiky and enigmatic ex-girlfriend of Tony. Her character is very
complicated. Her behaviour in her own house seemed mysterious. Later on she
dated with Adrian who was Tonys intelligent friend. In the second part Tony
tried hard to get some clues from Veronica about Adrian’s diary in possession
of Sarah Ford. She knew everything but did not revel anything. One can praise
her unselfish act of taking care of mentally retarded Jr. Adrian.
3)Adrian Finn
He was the brightest student. He was an intellectual man. He evaluated things
philophically. He dated with his best friend’s ex-girlfriend Veronica. His
diary was in possession of Sarah Ford Veronica’s mother. It is possible that
Tony’s letter inspired him to meet Sarah so in his last days, as Sarah wrote,
he was very happy. There is possibility of his relationship with Sarah as Jr
Adrian looked like senior one and Jr Adrian was believed to be Sarah’s brother.
Adrian did suicide for which he gave philosophical reason.
Now. After seeing the main characters and their unsolved mysteries lets think
about the main themes in the novel. The novel has themes like weakness of
Memory Aging, suicide, Eros Thanatos, class conflict.
1) Weakness of
Memory and Ageing
In youth it is difficult to recall all the events of childhood same way old age
is the age when memory gets faded. Weak or lighter. A person doesn’t remember
all the events in detail.
Why did Veronica’s mother have Adrian’s diary? Why did she want Tony and
no one else to have it? Tony finds mining his memory to find answers surrounding
Adrian’s suicide. His search literally reveals the weakness of memory as
corroboration.
“ I don’t envy Adrian his death, but envy
him the clarity of his life,” Tony muses in old age.
“ When you are in your twenties you can remember your short life in its
entirety. Later, memory becomes a thing of shreds and patches.”
Barnes provides only physical details. Hard facts couldn’t come out from his
mind. Tony’s recollection of. Adrian reveal memory to be a fractious and
fictious. Tony says later in life.
“All my conclusions are reversible.”
One can not rely on the Past memories as it comes in fragments. The narrator
has always made that same reasonable assumption, but act of revisiting his past
in later life challenges his care beliefs about causation, responsibility and
the very chain of events that make up his sense of self.
“ We
talk about our memories,
but should perhaps talk more about our forgetting,
even if that is a more difficult
or
logically impossible-feat.”
Barnes is brutally incisive on the diminishment of age: now that the sense of
his own ending is coming into focus, Tony apprehends that “ the purpose of life
is to reconcile us to its eventual loss”, that he has already experienced the
first death: that of the possibility of change.
Like everyone, Tony has carried his youth inside him into adulthood, fixed in
vivid memory. The advocate’s letter informing him that, 40 years on, he has
been left Adrian’s diary in a will, that sets Tony to examining what he thinks
his life has been. With its various patterns and repetitions, scrutinising its
own workings from every possible angle, the novella becomes a highly wrought
meditation on ageing, memory and regret. It seems as if Barnes—
“ Wants to tell all stories, in all their contrariness, contradiction and
irresolvability.”
Memory that is individual, accounts for who we are and what we have become.
Early memory is particularly valuable, though it can be misconstrued. Its
influence can persist throughout adult life, though what is cause and what
effect may be difficult to judge. In ‘The Sense of an ending, Julian Barnes
tracks the origin of one particular memory through a long and apparently
uneventful life towards an explanation that leaves traces of unease.
2) Suicide:
Man, who is
an intellectual person thinks of suicide due to his own philosophical thinking.
We find many famous people all over the world end their life in suicide. In
this novel a young boy called Robson commits suicide in the school. After few
years Adrian kills himself. The reason of Adrian’s death is not known. Adrian’s
death lead the narrator to mine his past. But Tony’s memory, the way it is
revealed doesn’t solve the mystery. There are many clues that helps us to
conclude but doesn’t lead to on conclusion. Many questions are unanswered
behind the second suicide whereas the first suicide was committed after making
a girl pregnant. Adrian Was an intellectual genius who went to one of the best
universities. He dated his friends ex-girl friend Veronica but his diary was
with her mother and the documents sent by Sarah to Tony said that he was very
happy in his last days. Also Jr. Adrian, a mentally retarded person, who
resembled Adrian’s appearance was taken care by Veronica. Jr. Adrian was her
brother. Thus, the clues lead us to think about Adrian-Sarah relationship which
might be one of the reason’s of Adrian’s suicide.
3) Eros and Thanatos
Eros is erotic love and Thanatos is death. Freud gave the theory that the
duality of human nature emerged from two basic instincts- Eros and Thanatos.
Freud sew an instinct for life, love and sexuality in Eros. In Thanatos, he saw
the instinct of death and aggression. The first leads to the reproduction of
the species and the other toward its own destruction. The theme of Eros and
Thanatos ran simultaneously in the case of Robinson and Adrian. Here, it should
be kept in mind that Thanatos also means death as a personification or as a
philosophical notion.
4) Class Conflict
Adrian was smarter than Tony. Veronica was an awkward girl. She was a misfit in
her family. She was self-conscious to dance in public. She felt humiliated. Tony
once spent a weekend at Veronica’s family home. At the time he had felt
uncomfortable, Socially inferior, and he was hardly surprised when the
enigmatic Veronica took up with more prestigious Adrian. She was class
conscious. She choose the better option. This way class conflict is also one of
the themes in The Sense of an Ending.
I have discussed some of the main themes of this novel. Barnes’ prose is
elegant, witty and playful. He can be associated with the post-modern writers.
He chose an unreliable narrator. He wrote with self-conscious linguistic style,
an intertextual blending of different narrative forms –which serve to
foreground the process of literary creation, the gap between experience and
language, and the subjectivity of truth and reality. Barnes fiction is also
based on psychological realism and his themes are serious, poignant and
heart-felt. He frequently addresses the nature of love, particularly its dark
side, exploring humankinds capacity for jealousy, obsession and infidelity,
alongside the perennial quest for authentic love.
Conclusion:-
Barnes does not come out and tie everything
together. The reader is left to go back through the events and dialogs in order
to resolve the mysteries. Regarding passages and many will went to completely
reread the novel. Any way the novel has an outstanding qualities that make us
pond.
-
No comments:
Post a Comment