The Sense of An Ending: An old column I wrote and forgot

Memory is a strange thing. It’s perhaps the only basis for your construction of life as you’ve lived it. Apart from the actual physical records — the diaries, the letters or photographs, now also emails, blog posts and Facebook updates, most of the sense that you make of your life is based on your memory — and that of others who shared bits of it with you.
So when Julian Barnes talks about memory being like “the black box aeroplanes carry to record what happens in a crash”, you can’t help but smile in agreement. “If nothing goes wrong, the tape erases itself. So if you do crash, it’s obvious why you did; if you don’t, then the log of your journey is much less clear."
That’s where every person can, in some measure, relate to The Sense of an Ending — we all know that the ‘crash’ parts of life are often much clearer in our heads than the safe landings. Of course, being more human and less machine, our brain might decide to go into defence mode and erase the crash part altogether. But that’s a completely different scenario.
Barnes’s Booker prize winning book essentially explores memory and the chinks in it, and how, when old episodes resurface, you might have to change the way you looked at your life. The book begins with intriguing, unexplained images from the memory of Tony Webster, the narrator and protagonist, followed by his more intriguing observation that “what you end up remembering isn’t always the same as what you have witnessed”. The story, though, begins with Tony’s description of his school days and his troika of friends to which is added the serious and scholarly Adrian Finn. Part one of the book follows the ups and downs of Tony’s life and loves, with reflections on history and its making and, among other things, on the philosophy of suicide. Most importantly, it introduces us to Veronica, Tony’s first girlfriend, the woman that he could never ‘figure out’ till the very end.
But it’s part two of the book that holds the real surprises; part one is just the stage being set. The twist in Tony’s life occurs when he gets a letter containing a message from Veronica’s mother. That episode sparks off a series of events that lead Tony back into his past, making him rewrite some pages of his life’s history, as constructed from his memory.
When you come to the end of the story, one of the things you’ll wonder about is the title. There can, in my opinion, be two ways to look at it. One — that it’s the endeavour of an ordinary man to create a satisfactory ‘ending’ to his life fast approaching conclusion, a man whose final sense of the ending of life is very different from what he had imagined.
The other way is in what you feel at the end of the story. There is, actually, no real ‘sense of ending’. It leaves you with a feeling of unquenched thirst, unanswered questions, of things you still want to know. But that’s how life is — you might never get the answers, even at the end.