The Sense of an Ending:Title

The Sense of an Ending:Title
                                         -Julian Barnes

Julian Barnes is a contemporary English writer of Postmodernism in literature. He was more famous for his prosaic style, who was born in Leister on 19 January 1946 and was educated at the city of London school and magladen college Oxford.

He has written crime fiction under the pseudonym Dan Kavanagh. His brother, Jonathan Barnes, is a philosopher specialized in ancient philosophy. After working as a lexicographer on the oxford English dictionary, he began a career as a journalist, reviewing for the Times Literary supplement and became a contributory editor for the New Review in 1977.He was assistant literary editor and television critic for the New statesman Magazine (1977-81) and deputy literary editor for the Sunday Times.

Barnes prose is elegant, witty and playful, and he often employs techniques associated with postmodern writing unreliable narrators, a self-conscious linguistic style, an intertexual blending of different narrative forms-which serve to foreground the process of literary creation, The gap between experience and language and subjectivity of ‘truth’ and ‘reality’. However, despite this playful experimentation with language, style and fiction and Form Barnes fiction is also foregrounded in psychological realism and his themes are serious poignant and we can say that Heart-felt. He frequently addresses the nature of love, particularly its dark side, exploring humankind’s capacity for jealousy, obsession and infidelity.

He lived with his wife in London, the literary agent Pat Kavanagh, until her death on 20 October 2008.after two fairy traditional linear novels Barnes first major success came with Flaubert’s Parrot (1984), his first book to be written in an experimental non-linear style. A highly inventive and brilliant work Flaubert’s Parrot intertwines the realistic personal story of its protagonist.

His exceptional works are

Ø Talking it over

Ø England England

Ø The Lemon table

Ø Nothing to be frightened of

Ø Flaubert’s Parrot

Ø Levels of Life

Ø The sense of an Ending etc.

So among them let’s take a glance on the novel The sense of an Ending: Title in detail.

If we see title then first it is necessary to know about the significance of the title as it signifies the core idea of any literary work because Title is one of the most significant parts of literature. It indicates its entire meaning so sometimes title can be name of major characters major event or incident that happens in literary work of art so Title is very much inevitable part of literature as it can be also called skeleton of any literary work therefore it matters.

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 Part-1 and Part-2.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. When they were in the last year of the college, a boy killed himself after getting a girl pregnant.

Thus, The Sense of an Ending is not just person’s story; it is a story of a network of relationships between Tony Webster and Veronica but whose ending is this! That we cannot understand.

The title deals with the entire book as the book opens; Tony is spending a good deal of his time thinking about his relationship with his school friend Adrian Finn, who committed suicide as a young man. Tony is Pooterishly content with his life and mediocrity, which he contrasts with Finn's burning and forensic intelligence. Even as a schoolboy, Finn demonstrated a precocious understanding of philosophy and history. He said that "he hates the way the English have of not being serious about being serious" – words quoted twice in the novel. This is a Barnesian theme too, lying behind much of his work, fiction and nonfiction, even when it is at its most playful.

Tony attended school in the 1960s, and many of his memories centre on him and his friends grappling with the new sexual freedoms. Not that these always arrived in their neck of the woods quite in time: one of their schoolmates killed himself after getting a girl pregnant. At the end of their school careers, Adrian Finn goes to Cambridge and Tony to Bristol, where he meets Veronica Ford. Veronica invites him to stay for a few days with her family in Chislehurst, and he feels himself to have been humiliated by her disdainful father and supercilious brother, both of whom are intimidatingly posh. But Veronica's mother, Sarah, takes to him, and even appears to offer him a mysterious warning about her daughter.

Tony Webster is in his mid-sixties when he receives a letter from a lawyer with an unusual bequest from the mother of Veronica, an ex-girlfriend of his from 40 years before. He is left some money and the diary of his old school chum Adrian. Veronica makes it impossible for Tony to acquire the diary so what follows is Tony's recollection of that period of his life.

          In the novel The Sense of an Ending the title plays vital role as the title itself suggests that the sense of an ending means here the question arises in our mind that whose ending is this? and secondly we can also say that according to the sense an individual can interpret the ending of this novel because here in the novel Julian Barnes has left us in thinking at the end of the novel therefore as per my reading it can be said that the ending of the novel is not clearly given or Barnes has deliberately done this to make reader thinking.

Here it can be also interpreted that Tony Webster is also in his ending means he is very much near to his end so he thinks about his past and memories that he had spent in his college days with his friends and he remembers all these obviously because at the stage of 60s an individual person also want his/her youthful days as in the novel The Old man and the Sea the central character of it feels nostalgic about his past therefore he remembers his days when he was young and also craves for playing with lion and all other things.

so far as my understanding is concerned in other words title of the novel can also be interpreted or if we look in depth of the novel then it can also be said that the end is not the ending of tony but rather it is taking new shape or reaching to the new understanding and newer perspective in self not outside.

In this novel there are ending of two lives such as Robson and Adrian as they commit suicide but in the first part He ends his life after getting a girl pregnant therefore his friends feel jealousy for him 

so Tony Webster says about his friend, who committed suicide when they were at university.

“I don’t envy Adrian his death, but I envy him the clarity of his life,”

          Julian Barnes’ award-winning novel The Sense of an Ending explores the themes of history, memory and responsibility while bringing some clarity into Adrian’s death.

The narrator, Tony Webster, is one of four school friends whose intertwined lives inspire Barnes’s plotting. The catalyst is Adrian. Like the others he is “book hungry, sex hungry, meritocratic, anarchistic”. He is also the brightest, the only one of the four to get to Cambridge.

Indeed, he is so bright that after remarking:

“History is that certainty produced at the point where the imperfections of memory meet the inadequacies of documentation,”

So the boys’ teacher suggests to him that when he retires:

“I would be happy to give a reference if you would care to take over.”

The seminal moment at school is the death of Robson, a fellow student. In his announcement at assembly the headmaster reveals nothing of the boy’s death but mutters platitudes about his being “cut down in the flower of youth”. Only later do the four learn that Robson hanged himself after getting his girlfriend pregnant.

The Sense of an Ending is unlike any fiction Julian Barnes has written before

Typically they muse on the kind of knot Robson might have used on the rope to ensure his end, but it is the pregnancy that matters more.

All four are itching to achieve full sex, this being the Sixties when sexual freedom is suddenly talked about and not just behind the bike shed. They know all about love from reading literature, but sex? Robson had got there first but who was the girl?

As for Robson’s death, Adrian quotes Camus:

 “Suicide was the only true philosophical question.”

This leads the friends to conclude that the suicide could only be considered philosophical in an arithmetical sense: Robson, about to cause an increase of one in the human population, had decided that it was his ethical duty to keep the planet’s numbers constant. Nevertheless the friends are jealous of Robson. His achievement had been “unphilosophical, self-indulgent and inartistic”. When they learn that his suicide note was rumoured to consist of just two words, “sorry mum”, they believe it to have “missed a powerful educative opportunity”.

After that Adrian also commits suicide who is more intelligent among four friends.so being a narrator Tony Webster remembers his college days and tells us his story and what happened when he was in his college therefore Barnes makes use of diary which helps reader to understand the story in a better way

At the end of the book, Tony feels even more guilt about sending his hateful letter to Adrian as he imagines that his letter could have practically driven Adrian into the arms of Veronica’s mother setting off the chain of events that lead to Adrian’s suicide.  You might think that Tony is being overly hard on himself because who would take a letter of passionate anger so seriously?  However, there are some reasons to think that the letter could have really had a significant impact.  First, Tony wrote a quick card to Adrian when he received Adrian’s letter and didn’t write his really nasty letter until weeks later after he had a lot of time to think it over so Adrian may have thought that the letter was not just written in a time of extreme emotion. 

 We know that Tony just delayed thinking about the situation because of his busy academics of the time and then when he started to write the letter, he was overcome with emotions but Adrian may have thought Tony had written his second letter after long thought.  Second, Tony clearly portrayed Veronica as unstable or “damaged” and portrayed Veronica’s mother as someone who Adrian should trust and seek out for advice on his relationship with Veronica.  On the other hand, it seems obvious that even if Tony had never written his letter, Adrian may still have been seduced by Veronica’s mother.  But, if he had not had doubts about Veronica generated by Tony’s letter, he may have been less susceptible to overtures from her mother.   

Tony still doesn’t understand Veronica. She tells him,

“You just don’t get it, do you?  You never did, and you never will.” 

As far as my reading is concerned now it is clear that Veronica was truly in love with Tony.  However, Veronica relied almost solely on indirect communication which just didn’t work with Tony.  When she ends up having sex with Tony for the first time (after their break-up) she was making a last desperate attempt to communicate her love for him.  However, all Tony thinks, due to his general paranoia, is that she is manipulating him again or just playing with his emotions.  

During Tony’s only weekend with Veronica’s family, Veronica’s mother was making a pass at him.  The major question that Tony still can’t understand about that weekend is why Veronica told her family that Tony wanted to sleep in and then go for a walk with her father and brother leaving Tony alone with her mother. In actuality, Veronica’s mother told her family to go for a walk so that she could talk with Tony alone about his intentions towards her daughter and she told Tony that Veronica said he wanted to sleep in so that he wouldn’t be uncomfortable being all alone with her.  Of course, the real reason Veronica’s mother wanted to have time alone with Tony was to make a pass at him or to plant seeds of doubt within Tony about Veronica in order to sabotage his relationship with her daughter.  

Veronica’s mother does not have a healthy relationship with her daughter.  She is either jealous of her daughter or resents her daughter and either consciously or unconsciously wants to hurt her emotionally.  It’s not all that uncommon for a mother to resent her daughter or to be overly competitive with her.  When a daughter matures into a woman and has all the advantages of youthful beauty, a mother can’t avoid facing the fact that she herself is aging and her own beauty is on the decline. 

 While most women would be happy for their daughter to be found beautiful, others could become subject to extreme jealousy.  They could also be subject to insecurity if they think that their daughter might be stealing all the affection of their husband.so Sara, either consciously or unconsciously wants to sabotage Veronica’s relationship and she wants to prove she is still a desirable woman with the ability to attract a younger man.  This explains her strange remark out of the blue to Tony, "Don't let Veronica get away with too much" and explains her extra friendliness to Tony.  And of course this also explains her affair with Adrian.

If Tony had not broken up with Veronica and had instead become engaged, the relationship still wouldn’t have worked because their communication styles were simply too different unless Veronica could somehow change her communication style to using a very direct approach most of the time.  The other possibility is that Tony would have ended up having an affair with Sara.  Obviously, he was favourably impressed with her based on his single weekend experience as he thinks to himself when driving away,

“I rather wished I’d talked to her more.”

Even if Tony did have an affair with Veronica’s mother, the results probably would have been much different than what happened with Adrian.  Tony would have most likely been very careful to use contraceptives due to his consistently “safe” lifestyle and even if Sara did somehow get pregnant, there is no indication that Tony as a man of inaction would even considers committing suicide.

To Sum Up:

Therefore The Title of the novel The Sense of an Ending depicts ending of two lives Robson and Adrian and on the other hand it also suggests that this is an ending of journey of Tony too as he is very close to the ending of his life. Hence At last it can be clarified that the title of the novel is absolutely appropriate though it is difficult book to evaluate but up to some extent we can say that Julian Barnes has chosen relevant title. By the time one reaches the end, it is not just the novel but the title itself that inspires the reader; not just the end of a life but how a story is told.