Tony, a man in his 60s, looks back at his life: Four friends at school a one-year relationship with Veronica at university a humiliating visit to Veronica’s parents a. Sebald, author of works (including Austerlitz and The Rings of Saturn) that often allude to the events of World War II. 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. Another contemporary writer to grapple with the questions of memory, identity, and history that so occupy Barnes is W.G. Barnes’s novel is also full of literary allusions, apt for a narrator who strove during his school days to be as brilliant and clever as his friend Adrian: Ted Hughes is explicitly invoked, but there are also a number of unspecified allusions to poet Philip Larkin (including the lines “wrangle for a ring” and “May you be ordinary”). Barnes’s novel is similarly concerned with how all people, not just writers, construct certain selective narratives about themselves and their lives-as well as how it’s sometimes only an ending (like Adrian’s untimely death) that lends a sense of meaning to everything that came before. The Sense of an Ending takes its name from a 1967 book of literary criticism by Frank Kermode, which studies how fiction imposes cohesive structures and coherent narratives onto what might otherwise seem like chaos, especially in uncertain times of history.
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