Juan Pino Final Post

After concluding this book, I must say I thoroughly enjoyed it. One of the things I most liked about the book was whenever Tony or Adrian would delve into any philosophical idea. I found that their insight was very, well, insightful (for lack of a better word). I found what they were saying made sense for the most part and I agreed with it. Furthermore, I noticed that one of the main recurring themes in the novel was the uncertainty of history. I particularly thought that the quote Barnes came up with was genius. “History is that certainty produced at the point where the imperfections of memory meet the inadequacies of documentation.” That one sentence alone encapsulates the definition of history all too well. In addition, history really is pervaded by unreliability. The whole story revolves around this one point. Tony Webster continuously and incessantly reminds us of this. Throughout the novel he will mention how he is uncertain of how something actually occurred. How he burnt letters and so he doesn’t know what truly happened. Moreover, in the end he realizes that his life had not gone down at all the way that he recalled it. This reminds me a little bit of Dostoyevsky in the sense that one cannot trust the narrator in either book as well as the fact that in the end it was all just one big lie.

Subsequently, I must comment on the fact that I believe that despite the fact that Barnes claims this story is not about him, a large percentage of it is definitely true, or based off of real life. When I wrote my story in class it flowed easily, was easy to write, and captured my audience’s attention because it in fact had a degree of truthfulness to it. As I was reading Sense of and Ending I felt a similarity between my first three installments and the story I was reading. Perhaps Barnes was simply an incredibly creative individual who also happened to be outstanding when it came to philosophy. In my opinion, Barnes is a man who lived his life, an “average life”, and had a moment of clarity followed by him writing this story in order to describe how he came about his moment of clarity.

Speaking of clarity, I saw numerous correlations between the novels we have previously read in this class and this one. Many of the same ideas and principles were present, from Kafka to The Stranger to Calvino to Dostoyevsky. In conclusion, I really like that this book had a little bit of everything we’ve done so far this year.