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.