end

            To be completely honest, I didn’t like The Sense of an Ending at all. Unlike the other books we’ve read so far, I found this book to be depthless. I felt like the whole time I was waiting to be surprised by some kind of an amazing twist or inspirational idea, but ended up being disappointed.

            I think Tony acted impulsively at times, like in the letter to Adrian and Veronica, but really who doesn’t act irrationally in the heat of the moment? We all slip sometimes but did Veronica really need to punish him like that and practically torture him with the statement “You’ll never understand”. I said from the beginning that she was a bitter, grudge holding, and overall unpleasant person, and I think her behavior proves it. She’s holding Tony responsible for something he really no part of, which was the affair between Adrian and Sarah.

            If the book shows one thing it is the importance of not adding or tainting memories but allowing them to remain truthful and honest. Once you begin changing your own history into something more pleasurable, you become a bit delusional; it will cause problems not only for yourself, but also the person you shared the memories with. Tony and Veronica broke up for a reason; they were simply incompatible for each other. Yet, even looking back on their not-so pleasant memories, Tony finds a way of twisting them into something that is so augmented it practically becomes a different story. And, if twisting the stories wasn’t enough, Tony uses a “cafeteria plan”, and chooses what to remember and what not to. He meticulously picks the good memories, like sitting on the damp blanket with the group of people and Veronica forty years ago, or dancing with Veronica for the first time. His mind is playing tricks on him and for that I guess he does capture my sympathy.

            Overall, I still don’t think Tony is a bad guy, he simply got caught in the heat of the moment and unfortunately it haunted him until “the end”. But besides this seemingly harmless character, I still have to say that the book didn’t really show me anything different about life. Maybe my expectations are particularly high because of the effect Notes from the Underground had on me, but as I close this book I really don’t feel like I left with much.

The End (Alexia Barrios)

The Sense of an Ending without a doubt was one of my favorite novels of the year. Unlike the others we have read thus far, the simplistic nature of the writing used by the author in combination with the thoughtful philosophical commentary by the pretentious teenagers turned adults make this book worthwhile. I also really enjoyed the plot, which did not fail to be surprise me at all. The ending took me by surprise. I never would have expected for Adrian to have an affair with Veronica’s mothers, and also that he would have committed suicide. I personally thought he was too logical, or too overly conscious to be able to go through with such acts, and though he left a somewhat logically sound explanation for his suicide, I am still left slightly confused with the affair.

Along with the twist and turns and overall writing style of Barnes, I enjoyed this novel because of the commentary that was made by the characters, and more specifically Tony. Throughout the novel we saw several reoccurring topics be mentioned throughout various occasions has Tony looked back at his life, many of the time it be the criticizing of history and memory. The concept that history is “that certainty produced at the point where the imperfections of memory meet the inadequacies of documentation” sums up his overall perspective on the topic of history. It is inadequate in the sense that memories are never perfect as they vary by person due to the fact that they are malleable due to a person’s perception of the event. This also ties in which the documentation of it, which may vary for these same reasons. Also, as Tony looks back at his life in the second part of the novel, he discusses the value of living life to the fullest. He discusses the value of memories versus just adding more events to one’s life, and that collecting more good memories is more valuable than the latter.

In my opinion, I don't think Tony gave himself the credit that he deserved.  He, like all the other boys, compared themselves to Adrian in almost every aspect of their lives, but mainly on their intelligence. Yes Adrian was incredibly intelligent, but so was Tony, but I am unsure if he ever came to truly realize how smart and perceptive he really was by the end of the novel.

Finished

      As a whole I quite enjoyed this book. It was smart and fast paced however it didn't have the density and complexity that has made some of the other books we read in class difficult, and thus annoying, to read. Somehow this book was able to elude to the philosophy that seems to be center to the lesson plan of our class without sounding overly pretentious with long sentences containing superfluous, educated words whose sole purpose was to make the book sound smart. This book is smart without trying to hard.
     I found that time was an extremly important concept in the novel. The narrator seemed particularly occupied by his inability to grasp time, how it held the world in an order, yet seemed to pass quicker with every day. The author even allowed us to feal the burden of time by passing by 49 years within a few pages. He effectively sums up a mans life within a terrivly short about of space and honestly that's a bit scary. He passed life so quickly when he started where all of us are and it makes us question if were really growing up, and what we're growing up for. His life seemed pretty boring and unextrodinary in his "older" age, and yet for some reason he was okay with it.
    Then we have to take into account how time destroys our memories and influences history. History is marked by time yet time allows history to fade away until we are left with small scraps that we must interpret. There is no way the interpretation could be known as correct because honestly we are all just guessing and our guesses are influenced by our own feeling and a need to put the blame for something on an infividual person. This leads me to the big suprise that is revealed, Adrian's baby. It seems that in a way Adrian blamed Tony for his mistake because if Tony's letter . However he also saw a situation in which everyone was to blame. He tried to write it out as an equation, however history and time are not as solid as numbers. There is no way of knowing the truth because it has all passed and now everything is looked at in retrospect. We simply cannot know why things happen and that is what I believe tot be the point.

Life is what it is

The Sense of an Ending, in my opinion, was a fabulous book. I thoroughly enjoyed reading it, from start to finish. While some of the characters angered me a bit, I still found it to be a good read. It was smart, clever, witty and funny, on top of philosophical and thought provoking. While reading this novel, I found myself thinking about death, time, and the meaning of life quite often. This might sound a bit strange, but I could not stop thinking about the song "Wasted Time" by The Eagles (I even referenced it in one of my annotations.) Maybe it relates to what Barnes is getting at in the book, maybe it is just a good song- I honestly do not know. The lines "Your baby's gone, and you're all alone and it looks like the end. And you're back out on the street. And you're tryin' to remember. How will you start it over? You don't know what became" and "So you live from day to day, and you dream about tomorrow, oh. And the hours go by like minutes and the shadows come to stay," just really remind me of The Sense of an Ending. As depressing as that song is, the truth behind the lyrics is overwhelming to the point where you realize that life passes you by pretty quickly and there is nothing you can do about it. And just like Barnes states over and over again in his book, sometimes (most of the time) you do not even remember it correctly. Your memory is altered over time which basically means that hooray, you will not have to remember all the sh**ty things you did when you were younger, but all the good and great things that happened? You won't be remembering those either. Well maybe you'll remember them, it just might be slightly more difficult than it once was. I like how this book was not a cliche. It did not go on about how the "meaning of life" is to go out there and live and do something great with your life. No. It basically said that the meaning of life is that there is no meaning of life. And in all honesty, I have never heard something that makes more sense than that in my entire life. But hey, I am pretty young after all. I still have a lot to learn. 

So it Goes (Zane Mandell)

I can honestly say at this point, after just having finished the novel that I did enjoy the short novel. It wasn’t the fact that the plot pulled the reader along and contained twists and turns. It wasn’t even the main character himself that I felt sorry for. It wasn’t even the feeling that I had towards Adrian and Veronica that have solidified my opinion on the novel. It is what is said “in between the lines” as the cliché goes. That is something that I found myself saying more and more throughout the novel as we found our narrator becoming older as the book progress: and so it goes.

I find that the novel evokes a feeling that cannot be explained, or at least not by me anyway. We are all blind to some things; we all make stupid decisions, and when all of that is realized from being able to truly see we then realize that it can’t be changed. We all do not get it. Even Veronica and Adrian do not get it until it is too late. And I see that is unfortunately just how it goes.

On the subject of the work as a whole I find that Part One and Part Two complement each other and are so vital to one another in so many ways. The ideas on philosophy, history, friendship, love, and remorse tie the narrator’s life together. Little fragments that he is able to pull back along the way. He is searching for what was always right in front of him; something that he had direct power of the outcome of the situation. It is a story of life but also a story of honesty, not holding back from how things really are, how we, humans, really are.

It is hard to take in all at once but I feel a sense of pride in completing this novel as I think it is one of those that is important for everyone to read. It gives perspective so that maybe you can live your own life with some knowledge of things, not as they are given in books but as they are given in reality. That is thing about it which I am still concerned with. What Barnes is getting at is that we all must be able to be on our own at some point, with no map, no compass, and no knowledge of what is to come. And yet strangely enough he has captured that sense within a book. Well as Kurt Vonnegut put “so it goes.”

Final Post

I really enjoyed this book and, in all honesty, I am surprised. I do not typically enjoy school books, but I actually liked this one. I thought the book would be relatable from the beginning, since they started off with ending high school, but I did not expect Tony to progress through so much of his life in such a short span. I think the biggest part of the novel that caught me off guard was the fact that Tony and Veronica had been watching Adrian’s son. I had absolutely no expectation of any mention of his child. One thing that I found interesting was the contrast between Margaret and Veronica. Tony briefly speaks on the topic of being attracted to someone who is either mysterious or upfront, yet he has relationships with both types of individuals. Margaret is much more straightforward, while Veronica is more mysterious. “Margaret would never give you a mysterious rendezvous up a distant Underground line. Rather, she would meet you beneath the station clock at Paddington for a specific purpose” (132). I think one of the main topics the narrator, Julian Barnes, focuses on is the idea of aging and making life worthwhile. He speaks several times about the idea of “increasing” as opposed to “adding” to life. There is a difference between simply adding more events into one’s life and making memories that matter. This idea also fits into the battle between quantity versus quality. I also found it interesting that Tony has such a low perception of his own self-worth. He constantly belittles himself, especially in comparison to Adrian, yet the end of the book completely transforms his opinion of Adrian. Adrian, while still intelligent, was more of a coward than Tony had understood. It seems that Tony was just as perceptive of what was going on around him, particularly towards the end of the novel. He is able to understand Adrian’s true character, and he always acknowledges the mistakes that he makes. I think that Adrian is more intelligent and self-aware than he gives himself credit for. 

March, 3rd Post

Though The Sense of an Ending covers topics ranging from sex and understanding women to friendship and (not to be cliché or anything) the meaning of life, it all falls under the umbrella of perception. He starts off the novel in his adolescence wanting to “live as people in novels live and have lived” (102). I remembering reading The Magic Tree House and the Nancy Drew series and wanting so badly for my life to be like theirs, I even remember believing that my life was actually like theirs even though I have never once traveled through time and space or solved a murder mystery. To be honest, I was a very dramatic child. As we grow older the more we begin to question our actions and our decisions, and the more realize that we are not as special as we once told we were. Barnes gives the example of “a survey of British motorists a few years ago, which showed that ninety-five percent of those polled thought they were ‘better than average’ drivers. But by the law of average, we’re most of us are bound to be average.” (109). Long story short, we are not as special as we like to think we are.

One of the lines from the novel that stands out to me is “ Sometime I think the purpose of life is to reconcile us to its eventual loss by wearing us down, by proving however long it takes, that life isn’t all that it’s cracked up to be” (115). This though appears to me as a catch 22, and I love catch 22’s.  The catch is that the “meaning of life” is to learn how meaningless life is. There isn’t going to be some unexpected finally. Chances are that we are going to die of old age in the middle of a nursing home. 

But I am not fully committed to Barnes theories. Though clueless about other matters such as women, he is relatively self-aware. I do not know many people who can genuinely admit to being average and not just say it as bait when fishing for compliments. Maybe I’m just not old enough to understand.

But I’ve decided to not worry about this sh*t anymore because according to Darwin, Dostoyevsky and even Julian Barnes I have no control over how my life is going to pan out, so why not just roll with the punches, right?