Thursday Reaction

            I finished the first section of The Sense of an Ending and can say that I really like it so far. It puts all of the different ideas and philosophies that we learned over the year into realistic perspectives through Tony’s narration of his life. I think that the first part of this book serves as an anecdote that will develop the second part because it puts everything into relative perspective as I have a greater understanding of Tony and his personality and temperament.

            There are two themes that I noticed in the first part of the book. Over the course of the first part, I learned about Tony from the time he was a teenager to his death. At first, he thought he would live his life differently than everyone else’s lives and the originality of his future seemed promising. Near the end of the part, I realized that everyone’s life all follows the same routine; excitement and journey at first, followed by love and damage, and finally solitude and contentedness. There is an inherent conflict in life because we all end up at the same result, regardless to our intelligence and experiences. This is why Adrian killed himself right when he felt a sense of love and belongingness, he couldn’t accept that his life would end up with his peers and enemies. He realized that in order to be praised like historical figures and great philosophers, he had to end his life before he arrived at the same level with everyone else. He has become a celebrity to Tony and his friends because he was able to think for himself and live with terms that weren’t the norm for society. Unfortunately, he killed himself before he could leave lasting impressions on society as a whole and now his is only a figure of time for the three other boys.

            In addition to this theme, I think that Julian Barnes is trying to make a point that philosophy is in conflict with law, society and religion. Philosophy questions the universal truths that society openly and unquestionably accepts impugning “the nature and value of life as organized by the state.” Adrian was at a completely different level of thinking than the regular people in society who were merely left to common sense and had to determine their actions from that. This is why Adrian killed himself right when he fell in love with Veronica; he had other reasons than common sense, which pushes humans to continue their lives until they die from natural death.