Final Post

In the end, I didn't exactly understand all the different family relations between Adrian, Tony, Veronica, and Marry, but I don’t know why people who were related to each other had a baby together. Something that stood out to me the most though was Adrian’s suicide. I felt like not only was his suicide related to realizing he’s having a child and is in love with someone he’s related to, he also proved Tony wrong. Tony said that he couldn't wait for them to break up in his letter, and by committing suicide, it made it completely impossible for any of Tony’s predictions to come true. The idea of suicide begin a sin has been on my mind in general because after talking about people's selfish human nature, why would people care so much about others ending their life. People who commit suicide are labeled as weak and taking an easy way out, however, they probably have the most strength to really be able to take your own life. I am in no way supporting that anyone commits suicide, but I’m just thinking about it in a different prescriptive. 

Another lasting impression I got on the book is the idea of remorse, and looking back on your life. Tony’s life was everything he did not want it to be while he’s a teen, but that probably happens to the majority of adults. Being a teenager, I have big plans and ambitions and want to break free of “societies institutions”. However, once “life just starts happening”, you see how hard it is to break free of that routine and time starts moving quickly. Once Tony reached a certain age his life stopped moving forward and the only thing that kept him going was living through his memories. When you live through your memories, all you can really do is think about what could have happened or things you wished you changed, and I never want to live like that. “We thought we were being mature when we were only being safe” (page101), is sadly true, because that’s what ends up happening to most people’s lives. 

In the end I actually expected more from this book, I thought it was going to be life changing but it wasn't really. I did not mind reading it but I liked Notes From the Underground better because it gave me more to think about. 

Final Post

As I reached the end of the book I must say that it shocked me, but I was pleased with it. Throughout the entire beginning of the novel, I felt the book was boring and not much was happening. I like books with action, with conflicts from beginning to end and the first half of Sense of an Ending didn't intrigue me that much. However, things changed on the seconds half, both for me and in the book.

I was absolutely shocked when I found out that Adrian had had a ration ship with Satah, Veronica's mom. After this relationship was brought up,  my interest for the ending rose since I wanted to find out the causes and explanations for such an occurrence. It is revealed that Adrian sought out Sarah due to Webster's letter, even though he didn't mean it in that way, and later on had little Adrian which ended being Veronica's brother.

At the end I felt bad for Veronica for having to go through all this. I have seen real life circumstances with things like this happening and it is highly detrimental for the son/daughter who has the mother in such a relationship. At the end, I believe Barnes is trying to portray the message that point of views over the years do change since as Webster looks back to his kyung years and recasts the letter he wrote tonAdrian at the time, about dating Veronica, he realizes it was a spiteful and extreme letter, where at the time it was just seen as a normal letter to a friend. It is true though that point of views may be changed due to new rvations or evidence that ournbroughtbuo and change one's perspective of life, such as when Webster finds out Adrian had slept with Sarah, however, I do not believe Webster stand to blame for any of this. He wrote a reply letter to his best friend on the topic of dating his ex girlfriend, it was impossible to know that all the following evens were to happen.

I am glad ideas this book as it proved to me that life is unpredictable, and all our actions have the power to create multiple outcomes in other people's minds.

Final Reaction

I think this is one of my favorite books that we have read this year. Though NFTU and The Stranger deserve a considerable amount of merit, I like this more specifically because it is not as dense. Barnes ability to focus in on very specific details could probably be characterized as being similar to the realism movement in literature. I know that when we read poems in spanish during freshman year, we discussed the realism movement for an extended amount of time. Much of the movement was centered on minute details. Though the works were not necessarily packed with themes, symbols, or information that made you think extremely thoroughly, the details are what gave the story life (sorry for the cliche). That is exactly what I like about The Sense of an Ending.
In my personal perspective, the book is centered around the idea that we can never really know anyone entirely, not even ourselves and that is a byproduct as basic human nature. I stated before that Barnes crafts his work around extremely particular moments and details; I picked up on my perspective during one of these aforementioned details. As Tony drinks his cup of whiskey and reads the letter he addressed to both Adrian and Veronica he is stunned at what he is written. This moment is what made me pick up at a point that I think Barnes is getting at. Tony's shock appeared to go past the standard "not remembering that I did that" shock; his shock seems to be more associated with the fact that he could not believe that he could do that a person. he was shocked that he, being of a specific nature/character was able to write something like that. Now, if Tony which seems to be a fairly good representation of the average man, cannot believe he wrote that, can we ever know ourselves then? I don't think that we can ever know ourselves entirely and that others do not ever see even 80% of what we see with ourselves. Essentially, I think most, if not all of us, spend our lives hiding from our true personas and don't even know it. I'm not sure the reason for this, but I know that I don't attribute it to Freudian psychology entirely.
Tony seems to have a definite struggle when his ex-wife tells him that "he is now alone". She does not say so abrasively, or in a "kicking him out" kind of way, she is just reminding him that he is now alone. I think he's more bothered by the state of being alone than he is by his ex-wife telling him how it is because he does not know his real self. He ends up having a problem with being alone because he has no one to identify with.

final post

Wendell Pfeffer

3/3/14

            After reading this book nothing has changed with Tony. He still retains the same thoughts of Veronica and Adrian when he was a young lad. When Adrian and Veronica became a couple Tony was left in distress and I don’t blame him. Like I stated in my past blog Adrian betrayed his friend by choosing Veronica over him. This shows how little I think Adrian actually cared for Tony. I actually feel really sorry for him when he had to deal with this situation I probably would have done the same thing he did maybe even worse if I knew that my “best” friend was dating the girl I loved. To be honest though Tony was a horrible match for Veronica; they weren’t a happy couple and if Adrian hadn’t intervened then who knows what would have happened. At one point though I thought that Tony permanently moved on with his life, but I was wrong. Even after forty years Tony had never forgotten one thing about Veronica, his one true love. He would keep obsessing in his mind about her over and over again to a point where I actually became sick of it. He even uses his friend’s diary as an excuse to see her again and too potentially get back with her.

            Apart from the situation Veronica and Tony had their seems to be a connection with Dostoyevsky and Adrian. Adrian and Dostoyevsky share the same gift – intelligence. They are able to see both sides of the argument with complete clarity. This can either be a good thing or a bad thing. For Dostoyevsky this gift rendered him inactive. But for Adrian it was completely different because he was able to fit well with others and make decisions. He even had some good friends, a good wife and a son. Still though I think he suffered greatly because of his intelligence, which could have been the reason for his suicide. I really doubt his suicide was because of Veronica or her pregnancy.

             I really liked this book because it gave me a first person perspective on a person’s life and the problems they faced. Many of the problems related back to me in the beginning but towards the end that started to change. I began to feel sorry for him because no matter how hard he tried he wasn’t going to get what he wanted and that was true love.

Monday Post

I really like this book for two major reasons. The first is the most obvious, It was fun and easy to read, it is the type of book that you read for entertainment. I found that once I got into it, I really did not want to put it down. More important, is the second reason, I enjoyed a lot of the ideas about life and time presented in it. I like how in part one, Tony describes a brief recap of his life focusing on the major events that he has kept with him for the rest of his life, I think that doing this added all the value to the deep thoughts and ideas presented in part two. After finishing the entire book, I stand by my previous blog post even more strongly and I believe that women are truly very manipulative and they do take advantage of me as is the case with Veronica, and Margaret to a certain extent. She uses Tony in her old age after having broken his heart because she does not want to be alone. Granted, Tony uses her for the same reason but it is not clear whether he ever stopped loving her the way she clearly stopped loving him. This goes to show that she was the one who made the separation happen and because of this, she is now considered the manipulator.

Moving on from this topic, I think that this book was written with several goals in mind. The first is to express the idea of the misconception we have of life. We tend to believe that life begins at birth. According to Tony, life begins, from what I understood, in your mid twenties and possibly early thirties. This is when he describes his life as beginning. When talking about his school years he says that at that point he was waiting for life to begin. The other goal is something that is discussed quite a lot, and that is the idea of: what is history? After reading this book, I believe that history is the stories left behind after everyone has told his or her version. In other words not the lies of the winners nor the acceptances of the losers, but a combination of everybody’s story put together, a balance. 

The End of Sense of an Ending

I really liked this book and I am happy to say that because anything that is ever assigned to me I end up hating it just because I have to read it by force and not for pleasure, but I am honestly glad I read this book. It was a short and fast read, and it connected well with me. I do have to say though that there were points in the book that got really boring in which I just wanted to put the book down for a long time or maybe skip a few pages.

This book was connected to the stranger in the way that Adrian had that clear filter. He represented that elite group in society that can understand both sides of every argument and value them equally. He also represented the undisturbed filter we are born with. He was able to look at thinks objectively, which is almost impossible for us because our filter is being filled with different things every day, and he understood that. He understood that history is made by the victors and is fully subjective. That to know history you must first know the history of the historian to see what approach on history he had.

It was funny because as soon I figured out Adrian’s son had mental problems right off the bat an my mind automatically made the connection. Adrian represent the elite group of abnormally high IQ that can be fully independent, and although he wants to be social and fit in in society, he isn’t able to socially function. On the other hand, Adrian Jr. represents that other minority that has the blow average IQ, which makes these kind of people dependent of others, but, just like his father, cannot function in society. So we are demonstrated both extremes of the social dilemma for intelligence levels.

I also thought this book touched a lot on the fact that memories are incredibly unreliable because of their subjectivity. Tony remembered himself acting mature about Adrian and Veronica dating all his life, only to reread the letter forty years later and find out that, in truth, he had basically wished hell upon them. Memories are what we want them to be. We have free will and free though which allows us to shape our ideas and memories into something that pleases us and makes us feel better about ourselves, rather than putting ourselves down with what is probably the truth.

Final Reaction

Sense of an Ending was one of those books whose endings completely take you by surprise. I’m not sure whether I can properly express how the novel made me feel. I’m not quite sure I can say, even after all that, whether I really liked it. The novel almost made me feel a bit empty, like the end of anyone’s life is almost as if you are waiting for death and preoccupying with things that are below average mental capable. That life for most people is average, and no matter what company we procure over our lifetime, death and the end of life, the deteriorating one the body and mind, is something that he have to face on our own.

The novel to me had a lot to do with history and the way we manipulate to fit what makes us comfortable. Tony had this imagine of himself that he had keep for almost his entire life about the way he was in his youth. The experience and stories from his memories supported his theory that in general he was a good man who accomplished many things. This imagine of young Tony, was in turn completely shatter by a letter he wrote to his friend, Adrian and his ex-girlfriend. He started to doubt his mind and his own memories. He started to doubt the way he felt about certain people. He started to doubt whether he just let life happen or whether he took control. He wondered if he was the kind of person worthy of living a long and happy life.

The he idolized his friend Adrian. Tony called Adrian suicide brave and logical. He even called to first class. Tony made it seem like Adrian had made the right decision by killing himself because he reasoned it all out with mathematical equation and natural logic. Then Tony perception of Adrian changed when he found out the true reason for Adrian suicide. He saw Adrian as a coward and a man so obsessed with the idea of brilliance that he made it look like he killed himself because of brilliance. He killed himself not for his intelligence but from shame. He was the kind of moral man that Tony had always remembered him as, but actually something completely different. In the end the novel made me realize two things: firstly that we often use our memories as a source of evidence to prove certain point, but when in reality our memories are embellished or too general to really give us any real conclusion. Second that sometimes that leaving things to the unknown is better.