Final Reaction

       I truly enjoyed this novel. The ending gave it a good twist and simultaneously made everything that was said before make perfect sense. Adrian, a character whom was initially presented to the readers as a clear-minded, intelligent, moral, admirable man turned out to be the exact opposite. As I mentioned in my previous blog posts, I really liked the person Adrian was. He almost seemed perfect. But reading the rest of the book showed me that I actually strongly dislike the person Adrian was, and that all the intellect and cleverness inside of him was worthless compared to the acts of betrayal he committed. First, he goes out with his "best friend's girl." Then, he betrays her with her MOTHER, and then, when the mother is pregnant with his son, he kills himself, betraying his son, his current partner, and every impression or belief that he ever expressed to any of those that were close to him. Adrian's suicide was once admired and respected by Alex, Colin, and Tony, but later I realized that this was all a false image that Adrian created, and these three men had fallen for it.
       Tony, on the other hand, is a completely different character. He just "lets life happen to him." He seems pretty neutral about everything, but not in the "Jesus" way. Tony is just indifferent about everything that happens to him, and when he thinks he knows what he wants, he realizes he wanted the exact opposite. Old Tony is, in fact, a hyper-conscious being; but that does not mean that his actions represent this. I question Tony's ability to love another as much as he loves himself. Because it is clear in his writing that although he has much self-hatred, he values himself more than anyone else as well. Throughout the entire novel, Tony wanted to find out what it was that Adrian had written about him in his diary. He wanted "The Sense of An Ending." He wanted to close this story and go on with his life, though now I wonder if his life would have had any excitement at all had it been for the presence of Adrian's story.
      In my opinion, this story has many important themes. Impulse versus logic, clarity versus distortion, the coming of age, the question of life, and the tendency of humanity to do that which is disadvantageous in order to prove a point. Everything we have talked about in this class was somehow a part of "The Sense of an Ending." The terrible things Tony had written, drunk and impulsively, to Veronica and Adrian, ended up biting him in the ass, and though he may not have recognized it, it caused his life to be depressing and resentful. Later in life, he realized what he had done, and felt remorse for it. The actions we commit under emotions and the heat of the moment are often those we regret in the future, and though we know that doing such things are bad for us, that the best thing to do is wait until the moment has passed so that we can think logically and coldly, we choose to do that which is worse for us because we simply can. Because we feel it is what we can do, even though we know it is what we shouldn't do. These natural human actions are represented by Tony's actions, and I know we can all relate to at least one of the incidents in the novel. I'm glad I read this novel and feel that it incorporated many of the discussions we had in class.