Because he suggested in his letter that Adrian speak with Sarah Ford about her daughter's 'damage,' Tony's action precipitated an affair between Sarah and Adrian, Sarah's pregnancy, and Adrian's death.Įxploring themes of aging, time, and remorse, The Sense of an Endingexamines the pitfalls of trusting one's own inherently biased and unreliable memory. After speaking with Adrian Junior's care worker, Tony learns the man is Veronica's mother's son. Tony apologizes to Veronica for not realizing they had a child together, but Veronica says he still doesn't understand. Veronica also shows Tony a developmentally disabled man who Tony can see is Adrian's son. The calculation seems to justify his suicide. Veronica drops clues, however, including a page from the diary in which Adrian makes a calculation involving Tony's name. Tony reconnects with Veronica, but she is unwilling to hand over the diary, which she claims to have burned. Tony doesn't think about his involvement in Adrian's and Veronica's lives until he learns, forty years later, that Veronica's mother left him Adrian's diary in her will. Several months later, Adrian kills himself.

Tony dwells on the betrayal and responds with a letter denouncing Veronica as a 'cock-tease' and suggesting that Adrian should ask her mother about whether Veronica was abused by her brother or father.

Months after breaking up with Veronica, Tony receives a letter from Adrian informing him that he is dating Veronica. Tony doesn't date seriously until he meets Veronica Ford while they are both attending university. He befriends Adrian Finn, impressed by the new student's philosophically complex answers to teachers' questions. Retired arts administrator Tony Webster looks back to the 1960s, when he was an apathetic but intelligent teenager. Julian Barnes's The Sense of An Ending is a novel about a middle-aged man coming to terms with how a cruel letter he wrote as a young man precipitated the suicide of a close friend.

Barnes the sense of an ending