“Eros and Thanatos . . . Sex and death. . . Or love and death, if you prefer. The erotic principle, in any case, coming into conflict with the death principle. And what ensues from that conflict.” How far this statement encircles the central theme of the novel The Sense of an Ending’. (Key: First explain concept of Eros and Thanatos and then illustrate from the text – love and suicide incident – and conflict in the memory of narrator)
The terms, Eros and & Thanatos - Greek mythology
Eros is the god of love and desire
Thanatos is the god of death.
Sigmund Freud makes use of these mythical figures to name the life and death instincts that co-exist within the human psyche.
Eros, the life instinct, deals with basic survival, pleasure, and reproduction. It appears as biological needs for human survival.
Thanatos, the death instinct, appears in opposition to Eros. It pushes a person towards extinction and an inanimate state. Often associated with negative emotions like fear, hate and anger. This drive was initially described in Freud‟s book Beyond the Pleasure Principle in which he proposes that
“the goal of all life is death”
Applying the Freudian psychoanalytic concept of Eros and Thanatos to The Sense of
an Ending, The idea of the interplay between Eros and Thanatos first appears in the novel when
Adrian speaks up in the English class. He opines that the poem they are reading is about “Eros and Thanatos … the erotic principle, in any case, coming into conflict with the death principle” (Barnes 6). This loaded phrase signposts the main idea that pervades the novel.
Another incident that reflects the conflict between Eros and Thanatos is the suicide of Robson. Robson, a student of Science sixth form, commits suicide after getting his girlfriend pregnant.
His libido drives him to instinct of Eros in him. As his sense of morality activates the death instinct and thus he commits suicide. In the case of Robson, “Thanatos wins again” (Barnes 13).
Tony is keen to satisfy his id at all times. His relationship with Veronica is an indication of his tendency to satisfy his Eros. Meanwhile, His relationship with Veronica also becomes physical but he avoids her later. Thus, the conflict between Eros and Thanatos begins.
Even after many years of his separation from Veronica, Tony is still attracted to her. He himself admits:
Another thing I realized: there was a mistake, or a statistical anomaly, in Margaret‟s theory of clear edged versus mysterious woman; or rather in the second part of it, about men being attracted to either one sort or the other. I‟d been attracted to both Veronica and Margaret. (Barnes 92)
He is not completely prompted by his Thanatos and that is why he manages to survive through all his obstacles.
The other instance of destructive impulses of Tony can be seen in his letter to Adrian, in which he has made his effort to demean both Adrian and Veronica. In that letter, Tony has urged Adrian to consult Veronica‟s mother to learn about her true colours. Tony‟s anguish is that his letter might have been a key reason for Adrian‟s suicide.
he opines over the concept of Thanatos or death, “The only true one. The fundamental one on which all others depend” (Barnes 14). Adrian's family circumstances do not appear to disturb the psychological and mental stability of Adrian on the outset:
His mother had walked out years before, leaving his dad to cope with Adrian and his sister. This was long before the term „single-parent family‟ came into use back then it was „a broken home‟, and Adrian was the only person we knew who came from one. This ought to have given him a whole store tank of existential rage, but somehow it didn‟t; he said he loved his mother and respected his father. (Barnes 8)
Adrian comes in contact with Veronica and they fall in love with each other after Veronica‟s separation from Tony. At that time Tony receives news that Adrian committed suicide. Adrian is also much driven by his Eros and that makes him come into a sexual relationship and the instinct of Thanatos leads him to death.
- Julian Barnes center in not to discuss ‘class difference’ or ‘culture’. They are rather shifted on the periphery of his discourse that centers on ‘memory’, ‘history’, ‘time’ and ‘quest for truth’. Illustrate with your reading of ‘The Sense of an Ending’.
The first thing is the fact that memory and reality do not always match and that memory is strongly influenced by the feelings that invaded someone regarding a specific event.
The novel actively questions the realness of memories. The protagonist and narrator of the novel raises a number of questions related to the quality and function of memory as one gets into old age. The novel is told by Tony Webster, a man in his sixties; he talks about his past, or certain select events of his past.
The readers are made aware of the slips in Tony‟s narrative, making them question the veracity of Tony's memories. The memory of Tony Webster, Julian Barnes justifies the universal truth that
‘one cannot know what one does not know’.
Tony's earliest memories of his friend Adrian Finn are from school. Adrian was the smartest of his class, quite different from other boys and became a part of Tony‟s best friend circle very soon. Most of Tony‟s recollections are centered on his relationship with Adrian and his ex-girlfriend Veronica Ford. Veronica has asserted that
“You still don’t get it. You never did, and you never will. So stop even trying”.
Veronica assumes the image of a dominant, stoic and cruel girlfriend in Tony's memories; she broke up with him right after she took him to her parents house and then started dating Adrian-his best friend from school. Both of them had caused Tony's great pain and his memories are nothing but a reflection of his pain and hurt. Webster remembers himself as a carefree young man interested in
discovering the intricacies of sex more than in understanding relationships or in analysing
the behaviour of his peers:
“the more you liked a girl, and the better matched you were, the less your chance of sex, it seemed”
Barnes begins The Sense of an Ending pondering on this kind of malleability of time. We read:
We live in time-it holds us and moulds us-but I‟ve never felt I understood it very well. And I‟m not referring to theories about how it bends and doubles back, or may exist elsewhere in parallel visions. No, I mean ordinary, everyday time, which clocks and watches assure us passes regularly: tick-tock, click-clock. Is there anything more plausible than a second hand? And yet it takes only the smallest pleasure or pain to teach us time‟s malleability. Some emotions speed it up, others slow it down; occasionally, it seems to go missing-until the eventual point when it really does go missing, never to return. (The Sense of an Ending 3)
Past is difficult to document and understand if the person at the centre of it all is no longer alive and any possible attempt at documentation can only be achieved through fifty year old memories of Robson‟s friends and family. Adrian‟s understanding of history was this:
“History is that certainty produced at the point where the imperfections of memory meet the inadequacies of documentation” (17).
As Tony Webster points out,
“[we] live with such easy assumptions, don’t we? For instance, that
memory equals events plus time. But it’s all much odder than this. Who was it said that
memory is what we thought we’d forgotten? And it ought to be obvious to us that time
doesn’t act as a fixative, rather as a solvent” (2012: 63)
Tony tries to build his shared history with Adrian and Veronica, through few available documents and from blurry fragments of memory. Tony is in search of a certainty, but that seems elusive.
Damage’ recurs as a motif in the novel. Whom do you think is ‘damaged’ and who is the ‘damager’?
a. Damage : the letter written by Tony to Adrain and Veronica
b. It damages Veronica’s relation with Adrain
c. Perhaps, leads Adrain to meet Sarah Ford > their affair
d. Sarah’s pregnancy > which may have lead to Adrain Finn’s suicide!
e. The child, names Adrain is born with metal retardness > damage caused by suicide of Adrain to Sarah while she is pregnant > or her middle-aged pregnancy
f. The letter damages several lives > Veronica, Adrain, Sarah and young Adrain
Denying the Narrator: Julian Barnes’s The Sense of an Ending 57his forties, the second part introduces his maturity, when certain documents haunt him in his struggle to come to terms with what the first part remembers. In other words, the first part is Tony’s past while the following one is his present which is shaped and then re-shaped by the revealed documents.
It is apparent, then, that Tony applies his “damage theory” to Veronica by aiming to repress those memories which give harm. Tony does not tell lies only to Margaret, or to the reader, but also to himself. However, the past he desires to omit haunts him; for he receives a letter indicating that he has been left £500 and two “documents” by Mrs. Ford, Veronica’s mother. One of the documents is Mrs. Ford’s letter to him explaining the motive of her will. The other document is Adrian’s diary now in the possession of Veronica and his unyielding search for the full document, Adrian’s diary starts. He explains he is determined in his search because:
“The diary was evidence; it was—it might be—corroboration. It might disrupt the banal reiterations of memory. It might jump-start something—though I had no idea what (77).”
After a long labour, he receives not the original but a photocopied fragment from the diary which relates Adrian’s intellectual exercise concerning accumulation and loss in life and which ends with the sentence: “So, for instance, if Tony... (86).” The revealed document increases tension rather than bringing any solutions. Tony does not give up and asks for more and Veronica, who is most unwilling to share the diary, provides
He explains that
“when we are young, we invent different futures for ourselves; when we are old, we invent different pasts for others (80).”
What Tony does is also to invent a past for himself. Confronted by the documents, Tony loads fresh meanings onto the photo that shows Alex, Collin, Adrian and Veronica together; this is another historical document. For the first time, he perceives in the photo the moment when Adrian and Veronica began to get closer to each other.
Towards the end of the novel, Veronica takes Tony to meet a group of disabled people which includes a man named Adrian. To the disappointment of Tony – who at first believed Adrian to be Veronica’s son – the disabled man is revealed to be Veronica’s brother, her mother’s son. Tony works out that Adrian and Veronica’s mother had an affair which led to the birth of the disabled Adrian. However, Tony’s working out of past events still feels incomplete and unstable since the reader is not given any clue concerning the identity of the real father. What remains are the questions which may have no answers but may bring up another questions as suggested by the last sentence of the novel.
“There is accumulation. There is responsibility. And beyond these, there is unrest. There is great unrest. (163)”
Thank you ...
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