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30 pages 1 hour read

The Sense of an Ending

Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2011

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Important Quotes

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“I remember, in no particular order:—a shiny inner wrist;—steam rising from a wet sink as a hot frying pan is laughingly tossed into it;—gouts of sperm circling a plughole, before being sluiced down the full length of a tall house;—a river rushing nonsensically upstream, its wave and wash lit by half a dozen chasing torchbeams;—another river, broad and grey, the direction of its flow disguised by a stiff wind exciting the surface;—bathwater long gone cold behind a locked door. This last isn’t something I actually saw, but what you end up remembering isn’t always the same as what you have witnessed.”


(Chapter 1, Page 3)

The opening lines of the novel serve as a kind of sensory overture, gathering images that will recur in the story. The last line of the passage states the story’s main theme: The fallibility of memory.

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“We live in time—it holds us and moulds us—but I’ve never felt I understood it very well. And I’m not referring to theories about how it bends and doubles back, or may exist elsewhere in parallel versions. No, I mean ordinary, everyday time, which clocks and watches assure us passes regularly: tick-tock, click-clock. Is there anything more plausible than a second hand? And yet it takes only the smallest pleasure or pain to teach us time’s malleability. Some emotions speed it up, others slow it down; occasionally, it seems to go missing—until the eventual point when it really does go missing, never to return.”


(Chapter 1, Page 3)

Tony here announces a theme of the story: The Fallibility of Memory. This passage foreshadows how Tony’s memory is flawed; the people in his life, such as Adrian and Veronica, are not how he remember them. Barnes uses onomatopoeia, where words sound like what they describe: "tick-tock, click-clock.” Barnes weaves in a rhetorical question—“Is there anything more plausible than a second hand?” to vary sentence rhythm and to create a sense of lyricism. This passage is contemplative and reflect how Barnes is primarily interested in his protagonist’s interiority.

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“I’m not very interested in my schooldays, and don’t feel any nostalgia for them. But school is where it all began, so I need to return briefly to a few incidents that have grown into anecdotes, to some approximate memories which time has deformed into certainty. If I can’t be sure of the actual events any more, I can at least be true to the impressions those facts left. That’s the best I can manage.”


(Chapter 1, Page 4)

Given what follows, this passage establishes Tony as an unreliable narrator. He does, in fact, feel nostalgic for his school days, and spends much of the novel reminiscing about them. Unreliable narrators are prevalent in postmodern writing, and emphasize that reality is up for interpretation, rather than being fixed.

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“Marshall was a cautious know-nothing who lacked the inventiveness of true ignorance. He searched for possible hidden complexities in the question before eventually locating a response. ‘There was unrest, sir.’ An outbreak of barely controlled smirking; Hunt himself almost smiled. ‘Would you, perhaps, care to elaborate?’ Marshall nodded slow assent, thought a little longer, and decided it was no time for caution. ‘I’d say there was great unrest, sir.’”


(Chapter 1, Page 5)

This passage weaves in comedy, namely the idea that “true ignorance” is inventive. An idea emerges which will recur in the story, which is the feeling of unrest. In Tony’s case the unrest will be psychic, created by his changed view of his past. He will reprise the phrase “great unrest” in the novel’s last line.

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“Another detail I remember: the three of us, as a symbol of our bond, used to wear our watches with the face on the inside of the wrist. It was an affectation, of course, but perhaps something more. It made time feel like a personal, even a secret, thing. We expected Adrian to note the gesture, and follow suit; but he didn’t.”


(Chapter 1, Page 6)

As prefigured in the novel’s opening passage, the wrist and the wearing of watches on it is a symbolic image. Here the school friends signal their immaturity by wearing their watches in way which they think makes time feel intimate, something that only they share. Adrian postures as mature by refusing to copy their gesture, but in fact he will prove to not be ready for the ultimate demonstration of maturity when it comes in the form of his fatherhood.

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“This was another of our fears: that Life wouldn’t turn out to be like Literature. Look at our parents—were they the stuff of Literature? At best, they might aspire to the condition of onlookers and bystanders, part of a social backdrop against which real, true, important things could happen. Like what? The things Literature was all about: love, sex, morality, friendship, happiness, suffering, betrayal, adultery, good and evil, heroes and villains, guilt and innocence, ambition, power, justice, revolution, war, fathers and sons, mothers and daughters, the individual against society, success and failure, murder, suicide, death, God.”


(Chapter 1, Page 15)

This passage frames a minor theme of the novel: the contrast between literature and life, which Barnes will exploit with some irony (see quote 10 below). Barnes almost personifies “Life” and “Literature” by capitalizing them, suggesting their importance and larger-than-life qualities. Tony highlights a common fear of youth: that life will not turn out to be dramatic and interesting. This foreshadows the mundane path that Tony ends up taking himself.

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


(Chapter 1, Page 17)

This sentence, which occurs twice in the novel, illustrates Tony’s lack of complete understanding. When first stated, by Adrian in class, the statement impresses his peers and their teacher as example of his precocity. When quoted later, by Tony, it takes on a more personal meaning, describing the elusive “certainty” he spends the rest of the book seeking.

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“And then life took over, and time speeded up. In other words, I found a girlfriend.”


(Chapter 1, Page 19)

Tony returns to the distorting effects of emotions on the perception of time (first explored in quote 2), and announces the disruptive effect of Veronica on the story. The quote also provide comic relief: The first line is vague and implies that perhaps Tony was engaged in some lofty pursuit, causing time to feel as if it were moving faster. The second line lands the humor—this pursuit was being with his girlfriend.

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“One of the first things she asked me was why I wore my watch on the inside of my wrist. I couldn’t justify it, so I turned the face round, and put time on the outside, as normal, grown-up people did.”


(Chapter 1, Page 25)

This anecdote reveals three things. First, it foreshadows how Veronica will come between Tony and his friends. Because of her influence, he no longer tries so hard to fit in with his peers. Second, when he turns the face around,” he hints that love will change his perception of time. Finally, Tony suggests that by being with Veronica, he is ready to mature, to put away childish things, to do what “normal, grown-up people” do. As it turns out, “growing up” and being “normal” is exactly what Adrian will be unable to do, and this inability will propel him to die by suicide.

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“Had we been in a novel, there might have been some sneaking between floors for a hot cuddle after the paterfamilias had locked up for the night. But we weren’t.”


(Chapter 1, Page 28)

Here, Barnes again plays with the tension between literature and life, this time ironically. Tony says things might have been different if they were characters in a novel, but of course, that is that exactly what they are.

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“I witnessed the Severn Bore. […] a group of us waited on the riverbank until after midnight and were eventually rewarded. For an hour or two we observed the river flowing gently down to the sea as all good rivers do. The moon’s intermittent lighting was assisted by the occasional explorations of a few powerful torches. Then there was a whisper, and a craning of necks, and all thoughts of damp and cold vanished as the river simply seemed to change its mind, and a wave, two or three feet high, was heading towards us, the water breaking across its whole width, from bank to bank. This heaving swell came level with us, surged past, and curved off into the distance; some of my mates gave chase, shouting and cursing and falling over as it outpaced them; I stayed on the bank by myself. I don’t think I can properly convey the effect that moment had on me. It wasn’t like a tornado or an earthquake (not that I’d witnessed either)—nature being violent and destructive, putting us in our place. It was more unsettling because it looked and felt quietly wrong, as if some small lever of the universe had been pressed, and here, just for these minutes, nature was reversed, and time with it.”


(Chapter 1, Pages 35-36)

The Severn River changing direction symbolizes the ways that time seems to change and flow differently in Tony’s life when Veronica enters it, as earlier suggested by his returning the watch face to the outside of his wrist. The “unsettling” effect of the pressure foreshadows the “great unrest that Tony will come to feel as he learns the truth about Veronica and Adrian.

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“If you’ll excuse a brief history lesson: most people didn’t experience ‘the sixties’ until the seventies. Which meant, logically, that most people in the sixties were still experiencing the fifties—or, in my case, bits of both decades side by side. Which made things rather confusing.”


(Chapter 1, Page 40)

Culture and historical context disorient Tony. He does not quite know the era to which he belongs; rather than each decade being a clear-cut reflection of tastes and influence, they are a hodgepodge. Tony’s attempt to learn the true history of events during his lifetime will further confuse him. Barnes seems to suggest here that our attempts to map time can make us feel lost.

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“And then there is the question, on which so much depends, of how we react to the damage: whether we admit it or repress it, and how this affects our dealings with others. Some admit the damage, and try to mitigate it; some spend their lives trying to help others who are damaged; and then there are those whose main concern is to avoid further damage to themselves, at whatever cost. And those are the ones who are ruthless, and the ones to be careful of.”


(Chapter 1, Page 44)

Tony delineates the arcs of three characters in the story. He will come to admit the damage he has done, and try to alleviate it. His ex-wife, Margaret, will continue to try to help him heal even after they are divorced. And Adrian will act to avoid further damage to himself by ending his life.

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“History isn’t the lies of the victors…. I know that now. It’s more the memories of the survivors, most of whom are neither victorious nor defeated.”


(Chapter 1, Page 56)

In the last line of Chapter 1, Tony suggests that he has gained insight into how we understand the past. His confidence only serves to show how much he has to learn, because some of his certainties are about to be subverted.

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“The history that happens underneath our noses ought to be the clearest, and yet it’s the most deliquescent. We live in time, it bounds us and defines us, and time is supposed to measure history, isn’t it? But if we can’t understand time, can’t grasp its mysteries of pace and progress, what chance do we have with history—even our own small, personal, largely undocumented piece of it?”


(Chapter 2, Page 60)

Reflecting on the intertwining nature of time and history, both on a personal and broader historical scale, Tony states the problem that confronts him in Chapter 2. His personal history is “deliquescent,” meaning that it is like liquid, shapeless and ever-changing, and therefore difficult to measure and document.

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“We live with such easy assumptions, don’t we? For instance, that memory equals events plus time. But it’s all much odder than this. Who was it said that memory is what we thought we’d forgotten? And it ought to be obvious to us that time doesn’t act as a fixative, rather as a solvent. But it’s not convenient—it’s not useful—to believe this; it doesn’t help us get on with our lives; so we ignore it.”


(Chapter 2, Page 63)

Tony again uses a liquid metaphor for time, calling it a solvent. Time doesn’t hold our lives together through memory, like we might think. Instead it undermines our sense of personal identity and our grasp of reality by distorting our memories. Tony also suggests that we disbelieve what we find inconvenient, and credit what we find useful.

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“It strikes me that this may be one of the differences between youth and age: when we are young, we invent different futures for ourselves; when we are old, we invent different pasts for others.”


(Chapter 2, Page 80)

Tony reprises the idea of the distorting effects of time. When he was young, he imagined that he would live differently than his parents, only to become much like them as he aged (see also quote 20 below). And now that he is old, he comes to see both Veronica and Adrian differently as he reconstructs their personal histories.

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“I’ve been turning over in my mind the question of nostalgia, and whether I suffer from it. […] if nostalgia means the powerful recollection of strong emotions—and a regret that such feelings are no longer present in our lives—then I plead guilty.”


(Chapter 2, Page 81)

In this passage Tony shows his growth. At the start of the book he denied that he was nostalgic (quote 3). Now, after 80 pages of reminiscing about the past, he is admitting nostalgia’s hold on him.

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“Had my life increased, or merely added to itself? This was the question Adrian’s fragment set off in me. There had been addition—and subtraction—in my life, but how much multiplication? And this gave me a sense of unease, of unrest.”


(Chapter 2, Page 88)

Tony’s investigation of Adrian’s diary causes discomfort that stays with him to the last line of the book. It is a response to the existential question of whether Tony has really made anything of his life, which he cannot answer with any certainty.

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“I remember a period in late adolescence when my mind would make itself drunk with images of adventurousness. This is how it will be when I grow up. I shall go there, do this, discover that, love her, and then her and her and her. I shall live as people in novels live have lived. Which ones I was not sure, only that passion and danger, ecstasy and despair (but then more ecstasy) would be in attendance. However…who said that thing about ‘the littleness of life that art exaggerates’? There was a moment in my late twenties when I admitted that my adventurousness had long since petered out. I would never do those things adolescence had dreamt about. Instead, I mowed my lawn, I took holidays, I had my life.”


(Chapter 2, Page 93)

Tony reflects again on the tension between literature and life. He invented a different and more thrilling future for himself (see quote 17, above), only to become normal like his parents. When reflecting on how he was as a youth, Tony uses longer sentences and polysyndeton, where words are separated by the same conjunction, in this case “and.” This creates a sense of breathlessness, emphasizing the sense of adventure that Tony felt when he was younger: “This is how it will be when I grow up. I shall go there, do this, discover that, love her, and then her and her and her” (emphasis added). When Tony describes growing older, his language becomes less breathless and more declarative. He uses asyndeton, where words are separated—not by “and”—but with commas: “Instead, I mowed my lawn, I took holidays, I had my life.” This reflects how, for Tony, life has lost its sense of urgency.

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“We thought we were being mature when we were only being safe. We imagined we were being responsible but were only being cowardly. What we called realism turned out to be a way of avoiding things rather than facing them.”


(Chapter 2, Page 93)

Tony chastises himself and all adults for betraying the dreams of their youth. At some point everyone cops out and says they are growing up, but actually they are selling out. Or so it seems: Tony is still in thrall to Adrian’s memory and is thus hard on himself. He cannot yet see his own fatherhood as the form of responsible, everyday heroism which Adrian could not attain.

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“How often do we tell our own life story? How often do we adjust, embellish, make sly cuts? And the longer life goes on, the fewer are those around to challenge our account, to remind us that our life is not our life, merely the story we have told about our life. Told to others, but—mainly—to ourselves.”


(Chapter 2, Page 95)

A pivotal moment in the novel’s exploration of memory and the art of storytelling, this passage describes autobiographical narrative as a form of deceptive self-assurance. The unreliable narrator is narrating his own unreliability.

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“Sometimes 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 it’s cracked up to be.”


(Chapter 2, Page 105)

Barnes suggests that the disillusionment that we feel as we age may be nature’s way of making death easier on us. If we had to die with all the hopes of youth, we would put up more of a fight against the inevitable.

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“You get towards the end of life—no, not life itself, but of something else: the end of any likelihood of change in that life. You are allowed a long moment of pause, time enough to ask the question: what else have I done wrong?”


(Chapter 2, Page 149)

In the novel’s penultimate lines, Tony reflects on the limitations of age and its burden of self-reflection. In these two sentences, he expresses his project throughout the book. He has been taking an inventory of his soul before he leaves the world.

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“There is accumulation. There is responsibility. And beyond these, there is unrest. There is great unrest.”


(Chapter 2, Page 150)

In calling back to the “great unrest” from his school days, Tony has actually revived some of the restive energy of his youth. In the end, he has not done the safe thing. Instead, by seeking the truth, he has done an unsafe and adventurous thing. Nor has he lost the spirit of hope that he once knew, that things can be different. As a result of the reflections in this narrative, he has come to see both himself and his world differently.

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