The Sense of an Ending

“I remember, in no particular order:—a shiny inner wrist;—steam rising from a wet sink as a hot frying pan is laughingly tossed into it;—gouts of sperm circling a plughole, before being sluiced down the full length of a tall house;—a river rushing nonsensically upstream, its wave and wash lit by half a dozen chasing torchbeams;—another river, broad and grey, the direction of its flow disguised by a stiff wind exciting the surface;—bathwater long gone cold behind a locked door. This last isn’t something I actually saw, but what you end up remembering isn’t always the same as what you have witnessed.”

The opening lines of the novel serve as a kind of sensory overture, gathering images that will recur in the story. The last line of the passage states the story’s main theme: The fallibility of memory.

“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 versions. 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.”

Tony here announces a theme of the story: The Fallibility of Memory. This passage foreshadows how Tony’s memory is flawed; the people in his life, such as Adrian and Veronica, are not how he remember them. Barnes uses onomatopoeia, where words sound like what they describe: "tick-tock, click-clock.” Barnes weaves in a rhetorical question—“Is there anything more plausible than a second hand?” to vary sentence rhythm and to create a sense of lyricism. This passage is contemplative and reflect how Barnes is primarily interested in his protagonist’s interiority.

“I’m not very interested in my schooldays, and don’t feel any nostalgia for them. But school is where it all began, so I need to return briefly to a few incidents that have grown into anecdotes, to some approximate memories which time has deformed into certainty. If I can’t be sure of the actual events any more, I can at least be true to the impressions those facts left. That’s the best I can manage.”

Given what follows, this passage establishes Tony as an unreliable narrator. He does, in fact, feel nostalgic for his school days, and spends much of the novel reminiscing about them. Unreliable narrators are prevalent in postmodern writing, and emphasize that reality is up for interpretation, rather than being fixed.