The sense of an ending: Take III

Abstract

Julian Barnes’s novel, The Sense of an Ending, follows his autobiographical meditation on mortality, Nothing to be Frightened Of, in offering a dystopian view of the meaningfulness of existence (“what it all adds up to”) in the face of an ending that amounts to annihilation, for the self and ultimately for the cosmos. In this he follows Frank Kermode’s elegant study in the theory of fiction, The Sense of an Ending, in which Kermode traces the fate of the modern novel in the wake, as he sees it, of the death of the traditional, biblically-grounded sense of existence as arising, continuing and ending under the providential hand of God. The present article provides the author’s own take on these issues, as exemplified in the experience—concurrent with reading Barnes—of a death in the family. The question arises, in this context: How do we assess competing claims to authenticy, and countering claims to mauvais foi, bad faith?