The Sense of an Ending

The Sense of an Ending: Title
                                                -Julian Barnes

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.

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.