Julian Patrick Barnes’s The Sense of an Ending1, a dexterously plotted and boldly
conceived novel deservedly won the much coveted 2011 Commonwealth Man Booker
Prize for fiction, though Barnes once cleverly expressed his dismissive attitude toward
it (prize), referring to it as a lottery akin to ‘posh bingo’(Brown, 2011). The eleventh novel
of this “most French of British novelists”(Craven, 2011), though not thick, deals ingeniously
with Tony, the protagonist and his mnemonic odyssey which accounts for who the British
are and what they have become. Like Ian McEwan’s novel On Chesil Beach, it also
presents lucidly the themes of youthful sex, inhibition, class, regret and unreliable
recollection. It also talks about the narrator who continues to have a constant re-immersion
into life as into the sea. Naturally, the protagonist is involved in spending a lot of time on
living, besides indulging in the act of revisiting later part of his life and challenging his core beliefs about causation, responsibility and the very chain of events that make up the sense
of self. He gives us appropriate resonance to what is unknown and unspoken—lost to
memory, a sort of a mystery that is deeply embedded as the most archaic of memories
which Deirdre Donahue calls “pretentious philosophical musings” (Donahue, 2011).
It is pertinent to record Barnes’s views on fiction in general and a great novel in
particular. He rightly observes: “Fiction wants to tell all stories, in all their contrariness,
contradiction and irresolvability” (Barnes, 2008). He unchangingly holds a set view on
the tenets of a great book:
I think a great book—leaving aside other qualities such as narrative power,
characterization, style, and so on—is a book that describes the world in a way
that has not been done before; and that is recognized by those who read it as
telling new truths—about society or the way in which emotional lives are led, or
both—such truths having not been previously available, certainly not from official
records or government documents, or from journalism or television (Guppy,
2000).
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