My Reviews on The Sense of an Ending: Julian Barnes

Here is the link of worksheet: http://dilipbarad.blogspot.in/2014/02/the-sense-of-ending-julian-barnes.html

The sense of an Ending is an novel written by julian barnes which is narrated by Tony webster.This novel can also be called as postmodernist novel.Here I want to say that His award-winning novel The Sense of an Ending explores the themes of history, memory and responsibility while bringing some clarity into Adrian’s death.So it is a postmodernist novel.from another perspective I want to say that at the beginning the narrator, Tony Webster, is one of four school friends whose intertwined lives inspire Barnes’s plotting. The catalyst is Adrian. Like the others he is “book hungry, sex hungry, meritocratic, anarchistic”. He is also the brightest, the only one of the four to get to Cambridge.he is so bright that after remarking:

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

I want to also say that the seminal moment at school is the death of Robson, a fellow student. In his announcement at assembly the headmaster reveals nothing of the boy’s death but mutters platitudes about his being “cut down in the flower of youth”. Only later do the four learn that Robson hanged himself after getting his girlfriend pregnant.Typically they muse on the kind of knot Robson might have used on the rope to ensure his end, but it is the pregnancy that matters more.i want to say that all four are itching to achieve full sex, this being the Sixties when sexual freedom is suddenly talked about and not just behind the bike shed.Therefore This leads the friends to conclude that the suicide could only be considered philosophical in an arithmetical sense: Robson, about to cause an increase of one in the human population, had decided that it was his ethical duty to keep the planet’s numbers constant. Nevertheless the friends are jealous of Robson. His achievement had been “unphilosophical, self-indulgent and inartistic”. When they learn that his suicide note was rumoured to consist of just two words, “sorry mum”, they believe it to have “missed a powerful educative opportunity”.so the sense of an ending is a novel which is narrated by unreliable narrator.

So as per my reading these are my reviews on this novel.