The Sense of An Ending

I have just finished reading The Sense of An Ending and I can truthfully say that I enjoyed reading it. Julian Barnes did a great job in creating a character to portray the role of a coming to age character. we here this term so frequently when it comes to novels. However, contrary to a normal coming of age story, the character in The Sense of An Ending, has a large period of his life shown. Usually, it shows an event from there time as a teen and ends there. This relates to my overall interpretation on what the book was about. In my opinion, Barnes is attempting to show an older man who has lived life to the fullest. Now that he is older and less active, he has more time to sit around and analyze his old memories. He knows that death is near and as a result he wants to fix all of the flaws and battles that he has had throughout his life. He tries to make good with an ex girlfriend who hated him for screwing her over. He also tries to repair the relationships in his family. While reading, there was one particular quote that stuck out for me. You can find it on page 13 "Life isn't just addition and subtraction. There's also the accumulation, the multiplication, of loss, of failure." To me this quote shows that it is the hardships that change your life and everything depends on how you react to it. Depending on what you do with your life, you have to try to forget about what happens in the past and focus on the future. This is something that Tony had a lot of trouble in doing. He always tried to figure out why he committed actions in his past and wanted to try to correct them even though there was not really a way that he could do this. Tony wanted to try to figure out why his good friend Adrian killed himself and in my opinion I feel as if Tony kind of blames himself a little for it. He thinks that if he never sent the letter then he might have had a better relationship with him. However, Veronica (or who knows maybe it was Mary) did not allow him to find out the real way that Adrian responded out of a cowardish act.