Thinking Activity: The sense of an Ending

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This blog is a part of my thinking activity given by professor Dr.Dilip Barad. In this blog,we have to write our views regarding below given questions. To see the blog and the questions click here

The sense of an ending is novel written by Julian Burns. Tony  Webster is an protagonist of Novel who is in his 60s. He is on that time off life that now he get something to know about his past life events then he is not able to do anything.  The same thing happen with him that due to some reason he has to look at his past then he realized that whatever is in his memory is not true. And the actual truth is different than his memory.  All the truth of his actual life came to him  and at the end he got shocked with some of his own doing. For that he write that Who has done this I am not that Tony. 

1) A general critique of this novel also

2) Study of film adaptation

click here

Although I found the pacing of the novel quite slow at times in the second section, the climax was absorbing and tense. The final revelations force the reader to reconsider Tony’s narrative in a whole new light, become a literary detective and piece together the various clues amongst the faded memories. I’m trying to comment without revealing any major spoilers, but a quote from a review by The iIndependent captures the mood well: ‘the concluding scenes grip like a thriller – a whodunnit of memory and morality’. It is to Barnes credit that we initially read Tony as a genuine, average – if not emotional protagonist, with Veronica the unstable and calculating antithesis. But memories are subjective, and once the repressed past surfaces, we draw closer to the causes of Adrian’s suicide and Veronica’s anxieties – Tony has a part to play in both. 

Sexuality is another major theme in the novel. Tony describes his clique of friends as ‘sex-hungry’, and the metaphor of the ‘holding-pen’, from which they are ‘waiting to be released’, denotes their desire for sexual, as well as social, liberation. Throughout the first section, Tony’s disdain towards Veronica is centred around her rejection of sex. Later, it is implied that Sarah’s (Veronica’s mother) sexual transgressions have stunted her daughter’s psychological growth. Issues in the private, sexual sphere repeatedly spill out into the public world and cause great pain, affecting both filial and romantic relationships. 

The Sense of an Ending is dramatically different in tone, style and register to England, England, the only other Barnes novel I’ve read – this attests to authorial scope and imagination. The real achievement of The Sense of an Ending is that it offers no concrete ending. Upon completion, it demands to be re-read and analysed further. This process mimics the text’s plot, in which Tony must confront and scrutinise his murky past from a new perspective, peeling away the layers of artificiality he has constructed in his head. 

It's a book about history and how we recall events.” Robin Leggett

When we read the Novel The Sense Of An Ending sat that time we see that this is a book about the once personal history. We all have our own history of life with which we live. we see this book we are that this book is about the some events happened with Tony and how he recall history. When he got the truth that time he didn't able to believe that in his life he has do e some things like this also.

we see that this bool is about the personal history. we all have our own history. so, we can say that it is a book about history & how we recall events.

2) Study of film adaptation

A film adaptation is the transfer of a work or story, in whole or in part, to a feature film. Although often considered a type of derivative work, film adaptation has been conceptualized recently by academic scholars such as Robert Stam as a dialogic process.

A common form of film adaptation is the use of a novel as the basis of a feature film. Other works adapted into films include non-fiction (including journalism), autobiography, comic books, scriptures, plays, historical sources and other films. From the earliest days of cinema, in nineteenth-century Europe, adaptation from such diverse resources has been a ubiquitous practice of filmmaking.

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