The Sense of an Ending 

The Sense of an Ending is a 2011 novel written by British author Julian Barnes. The book is Barnes'
eleventh novel written under his own name (he has also written crime fiction under the pseudonym Dan
Kavanagh) and was released on 4 August 2011 in the United Kingdom. The Sense of an Ending is narrated
by a retired man named Tony Webster, who recalls how he and his clique met Adrian Finn at school and
vowed to remain friends for life. When the past catches up with Tony, he reflects on the paths he and his
friends have taken. In October 2011, The Sense of an Ending was awarded the Man Booker Prize. The
following month it was nominated in the novels category at the Costa Book Awards.

The title is borrowed from a book of the same name by Frank Kermode first published in 1967,
subtitled Studies in the Theory of Fiction, the stated aim of which is "making sense of the ways we try to
make sense of our lives". Kermode's book is a well received piece of literary criticism. Critic Colin Burrow
called it one of “the three most inspiring works of literary criticism written in the twentieth century”,
comparing Kermode's work with Erich Auerbach's Mimesis and E.R. Curtius's European Literature and the
Latin Middle Ages.Barnes's reappropriation is puzzling; the critic Boyd Tonkin has interpreted this as “a
veiled hommage” [sic], underlining that Barnes's characters in The Sense of an Endingcould typically be
readers of Kermode's The Sense of an Ending.

The novel is divided into two parts, entitled "One" and "Two", both of which are narrated by Tony Webster
when he is retired and living alone. The first part begins in the 1960s with four intellectually arrogant school
friends, of whom two feature in the remainder of the story: Tony, the narrator, and Adrian, the most
precociously intelligent of the four. Towards the end of their school days another boy at the school hangs
himself, apparently after getting a girl pregnant. The four friends discuss the philosophical difficulty of
knowing exactly what happened. Adrian goes to Cambridge University and Tony to Bristol University. Tony
acquires a girlfriend, Veronica, at whose family home he spends an awkward weekend. Their relationship
fails in some acrimony. In his final year at university Tony receives a letter from Adrian informing him that
he is going out with Veronica. Tony replies to the letter. Some months later he is told that Adrian has
committed suicide, leaving a note addressed to the coroner saying that the free person has a philosophical
duty to examine the nature of their life, and may then choose to renounce it. Tony admires the reasoning. He
briefly recounts the following uneventful forty years of his life until his sixties. At this point Tony's
narration of the second part of the novel – which is twice as long as the first – begins, with the arrival of a
lawyer's letter informing him that Veronica's mother has bequeathed him £500 and two documents.These
lead him to re-establish contact with Veronica and after a number of meetings with her, to re-evaluate the
story he has narrated in the first part.