“What you end up remembering isn’t always the same as what you have witnessed.” (Alexia Barrios)

Based on what I have read so far I know I am going to enjoy this book. It is simplistic in comparison to Dostoyevsky, Kafka, and the previous author that we have tackled and that is what I seem to really enjoy about it.

Though The Sense of an Ending may be more simplistic in the style of writing, I find that it still presents very though provoking concepts and ideas that I found to be similar in nature to those presented by Dostoyevsky in Notes from the Underground. I first noticed this when the concept of memories were initially introduced when the narrator said “What you end up remembering isn’t always the same as what you have witnessed.” (3) I found the concept of a subjective memory to be very intriguing and entirely factual. Memories are subjective in the sense that we interpret or remember them the way that we want to, which in many cases may not necessarily be the way that the event actually occurred. This concept again is brought up later when Finn states “That’s one of the central problems of history, isn’t it, sir? The question of subjective versus objective interpretation, the fact that we need to know the history of the historian in order to understand the version that is being put in front of us’” (11) Adrian here goes more in debt into the issue of history because it is a collection of memories that can be interpreted in many which ways depending on who is writing it all down. Along with this concept, I also found there to be others that were similar to those presented in NFTU for example when the narrator expresses that they “imagined ourselves as being kept in some kind of holding pen, waiting to be released into our lives” (10) and that “release would only be into a larger holding pen, whose boundaries would be at first indiscernible.” (10) This seems to dive into the concept that we discussed in NFTU, which is the concept of the wall. We try to break through the wall but at the same time we embrace that very same wall because it provides us with a sense of security.

            Overall, I like The Sense of an Ending so far and I am intrigued to see where this tale of four pretentious high school friends go and what other philosophical concepts Barnes will introduce.