the sense of an ending
TRANSCRIPT
Topic: The Sense of an EndingPaper Name: The New LiteraturePaper: 13Prepared by: Drashti MehtaRoll No:7PG Enrollment No:PG13101021Sem:4Email id: [email protected] to: Smt. S.B. Gardi, Department of English, Maharaja Krishnakumarsinghji Bhavnagar UniversityBhavnagar UniversityBhavnagar(Gujarat-India)
1.“ The thinking person has a philosophical
duty to examine the nature of their life, and
may then choose to renounce it.”Explain.Psycho thriller novel
•The novel is full of Ambiguities
•Barnes doesn’t waste any extra words explaining what’s happening
•He leaves up to the readers to interpret the events and conversations
Ambiguity
The Title, “The Sense of an Ending”
is borrowed from a text by Frank Kermode subtitled “Studies in the theory of fiction”
…that aims at “making sense of the ways we try to make sense of our lives”.
“At some very low level we shall share certain fictions about time and they testify to the continuity of what is called human nature”.
Sartre’s philosophy isa philosophy of crisis,but his world has nobeginning and no end.
Critical Observations
• “The Sense of an Ending” looks at the ways in which people distort or tailor the past in an effort to mythologies their own lives.” _Michiko Kakutani
• “The Sense of an Ending, fittingly deals with grave existential questions.” _ A. J. Kirby
Chain of Individual
responsibility
Connections-Reflections
Despair
RemorseExistence
Introspection
Moral Philosophy
Hyams(1998)(her article of Dissociation)
talks about polarities, theory of Opposite
Life -Death
Left-Right
Black- White
Matter-Anti-
Matter
Protons-Electrons
High-Low
+-
Good-Bad
She asks “Does something exist that does not have an
opposite?”
Sigmund Freud
Eros and Thanatos,
Life instinct and the death instinct,
“The ego and the id”,
1) Are Eros and Thanatos interacting or not?
2)When they do not interact what happens?
3)When they do interact what happens?
Eros
Thanatos
Eros Thanatos
The idea of Suicide
We should note that
throughout all over the
world many intellectual
people did suicide
Robson’s SuicideAdrian’s Suicide
Ex: Three IdiotsAshiqui 2
Robson
• “Sorry, mum,”
his suicide
note reads
according to
rumor.
A student, hangs
himself after
getting a girl
pregnant.
Adrian
-bathwater long gone cold behind alocked door.
The man of intellect, later commits suicide
The second suicide, a few years later, is Adrian’s
We are first led to believe that
his is supremely rational,
his own answer to the
philosophical problem which
Camus said was the only real
one.
He might have understood the
reality, and he might have
thought about his own life and
deeds.
!
!!
In the letter he left for the coronerhe had explained his reasoning:
There was practically a QED at the end.
Adrian had asked the coroner to make hisargument public, and the official had obliged.
Life is a gift bestowed withoutanyone asking for it;
that the thinking person has aphilosophical duty to examine boththe nature of life and theconditions it comes with;
and that if this person decides torenounce the gift no one asks for,
it is a moral and human duty to acton the consequences of thatdecision.
Anthony Webster( Tony): the Narrator
“ I don’t envy Adrian his death but I envy him the clarity of his life”-Tony muses in old age
Tony makes a major discovery which reveals more clues about the central mysteries of the novel
Life wouldn’t turn out to be like Literature.
Barnes is brutally incisive on thediminishments of age: now that the sense ofhis(Tony) own ending is coming into focus,
Tony apprehends that "the purpose of life isto reconcile us to its eventual loss“ ,
that he has already experienced the firstdeath:
that of the possibility of change.
Tony tries to remember his school days, college days and his break up with Veronica as he himself choose peaceful life
Tony tries to know why Veronica’s mother
left documents and money for him
He remembers how Adrian asks his permission for dating Veronica, he remembers how he answered him to consult her mother
He tries to know why
Adrian’s diary was with Sarah
Ford
He thinks,Why Sarah Ford had written: “P.S.
It may soundodd, but I think
the last months of his life
were happy.”
He is thinking about his Letters
Which End?
The End
Ending of life,
Ending of the novel,
Ending of an age,
It is an Ending that makes Sense, and what became of his philosophical friend is that Tony tries to make the sense of.
and so on…
Sources
• wikipedia.com
• goodreads.com
• julienbarnes.com
• amazon.in
• andrewblackman.net
• Julian Barnes- The Sense of an Ending(Text)