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 Sense of an Ending opens with Tony recalling, "in no particular order," a series of images that on the surface mean nothing, but by the end of the novel will each take on their own significance. After the last image (a bathtub full of cold water behind a locked door), Tony admits that it is not something he saw. However, it sits in his memory with the same weight as things he has actually seen. In this passage, Tony comments on the extent to which memories are created and recreated by the brain, making them subjective rather than objective. In this way, Barnes introduces the topic of the unreliability of memory, which will prove to be one of the novel's most important themes.
This was another of our fears: that Life wouldn't turn out to be like Literature. Look at our parents – were they the stuff of Literature? At best, they might aspire to the condition of onlookers and bystanders, part of a social backdrop against which real, true, important things could happen.
After Robson kills himself, Tony and his friends react with a paradoxical envy. In this passage, Tony comments on how he and his teenage friends feared that they would grow up to live the same dull lives as their parents. Meanwhile, Robson's suicide was such an extreme act that it was "the stuff of Literature"—a dramatic interruption of the status quo. Tony's comments are also ironic given that he is professing a desire to live a life worthy of literature while narrating a book.
"History isn't the lies of the victors, as I once glibly assured Old Joe Hunt; I know that now. It's more the memories of the survivors, most of whom are neither victorious or defeated."
At the end of the first part of the novel, Tony references an earlier scene in which he answered Joe Hunt's question by recycling the cliché that "history is the lies of the victors." Looking back on his adolescence forty years later, Tony can finally supply an original response. In this passage, he states that history is constructed from the memories of those who survive long enough to discuss the past. Additionally, those survivors' backgrounds are too complicated to lump them into simplistic categories of winners and losers. Rather, they exist somewhere in the middle, having persevered but not necessarily succeeded.
Another detail I remember: the three of us, as a symbol of our bond, used to wear our watches with the face on the inside of the wrist. It was an affectation, of course, but perhaps something more. It made time feel like a personal, even a secret, thing. We expected Adrian to note the gesture, and follow suit; but he didn’t.
When looking back on his adolescent affectations, Tony recalls how he, Colin, and Alex used to flip their wristwatches around, wearing them with the face turned inward. In this passage, Tony acknowledges that the small act of rebellion against the status quo was a means of getting attention and setting them apart from others, but it also brought the friends together, giving them all a different relationship to time. Adrian, however, disappoints the others by not following the trend—a subtle rejection that keeps his new friends at a distance and inverts the power dynamic, provoking them to try to gain Adrian's approval.
I certainly believe we all suffer damage, one way or another. How could we not, except in a world of perfect parents, siblings, neighbours, companions? And then there is the question, on which so much depends, of how we react to the damage: whether we admit it or repress it, and how this affects our dealings with others. Some admit the damage, and try to mitigate it; some spend their lives trying to help others who are damaged; and then there are those whose main concern is to avoid further damage to themselves, at whatever cost. And those are the ones who are ruthless, and the ones to be careful of.
In his letter to Adrian and Veronica, Tony suggests that Veronica suffers psychologically from some "damage" in her childhood. In this passage, Tony elaborates for the reader about how he believes all people have been harmed mentally by traumatic, damaging experiences. In this paragraph, he outlines the various responses to trauma that he has observed. There are those who admit to trauma and try to heal, those who become fixated on helping others overcome their trauma, and those who repress and avoid confronting their trauma. Tony sees this last category as the people to be wary of, as their efforts to avoid confronting their trauma often results in harming others, a sentiment that invokes the idiom "hurt people hurt people."
"It may sound odd, but I think the last months of his life were happy."
In a letter left to Tony upon her death, Veronica's mother, Sarah, attempts to reassure Tony by saying that—as strange as it sounds considering he killed himself—the last months of Adrian's life were happy. The statement stands out to Tony not only for its paradoxical nature but because Sarah does not elaborate on why she believes this to be the case. Barnes doesn't reveal the mysterious line's full significance until Tony finally realizes that Sarah and Adrian were having an affair before he died. With this knowledge, Tony realizes that despite the way he left the world, Adrian's last months alive were fulfilling because of his affair with Sarah.
"5.6 Thus how might you express an accumulation containing the integers b, a1, a2, s, v?"
On the single page of Adrian's diary that Veronica gives Tony, Adrian lays out what appears to be the logical reasoning that led him to conclude he should kill himself. In this passage, Adrian uses dispassionate language to make sense of his life and the decision he is facing. While Tony is initially baffled by the calculation, he comes to understand that the integers b, a1, a2, s, and v represent baby, Adrian, Anthony, Sarah, and Veronica. To understand how he got to position where he has impregnated his girlfriend's mother, Adrian writes out a chain of responsibility that implicates Tony.
Dear Adrian – or rather, Dear Adrian and Veronica (hello, Bitch, and welcome to this letter),
Well you certainly deserve one another and I wish you much joy. I hope you get so involved that the mutual damage will be permanent. I hope you regret the day I introduced you. And I hope that when you break up, as you inevitably will – I give you six months, which your shared pride will extend to a year, all the better for fucking you up, says I – you are left with a lifetime of bitterness that will poison your subsequent relationships. Part of me hopes you’ll have a child, because I’m a great believer in time’s revenge, yea unto the next generation and the next.
After reconnecting with Veronica when they are retirement-age, Tony receives from her the cruel letter he sent her and Adrian when they were in their twenties. To re-read his words forty years later is significant to Tony, as he did not remember being as nasty as he was. Stung by what he saw as a betrayal orchestrated by his ex-girlfriend, Tony denounces the couple and wishes that their lives will be ruined. This immature venting gains greater significance in the novel when Tony discovers that his words were eerily prophetic. Like he predicted, the relationship did not last long, ending when Adrian cheated on Veronica with her mother and then killed himself. And rather than time getting its revenge on Veronica by cursing her child, the child Adrian and Sarah conceive is born developmentally disabled, leaving Veronica to be forever reminded of her mother's and boyfriend's betrayal.
The time-deniers say: forty’s nothing, at fifty you’re in your prime, sixty’s the new forty, and so on. I know this much: that there is objective time, but also subjective time, the kind you wear on the inside of your wrist, next to where the pulse lies. And this personal time, which is the true time, is measured in your relationship to memory. So when this strange thing happened – when these new memories suddenly came upon me – it was as if, for that moment, time had been placed in reverse.
At the end of the novel, Tony reflects on how his relationship to time has changed significantly over his lifetime. He concludes that there are two types of time, the one measured objectively by clocks, and the one contained within memory. After he is confronted with new evidence that suggests his memories of his youth were skewed in his favor and are packed with convenient elisions, Tony feels as though time has gone backward as he puts together a fuller picture of the person he was and is.
I thought of a woman frying eggs in a carefree, slapdash way, untroubled when one of them broke in the pan; then the same woman, later, making a secret, horizontal gesture beneath a sunlit wisteria.
On the final page of The Sense of an Ending, Tony's narration circles back to the images that opened the novel. In this passage, he recalls again how Veronica's mother cooked eggs for him before throwing the hot pan in the sink. He expands on the image, remembering something he didn't see but could imagine happening: Sarah making a sexual pass at Adrian as they sit together on her wisteria-covered patio. The passage is significant because it shows how Tony finally understands what was behind Adrian's suicide and Veronica's resentment. If Tony had never suggested in his letter that Adrian speak privately with Sarah, the affair might never have started, Adrian might not have killed himself, and Veronica might never have had to live with the humiliating betrayal that was her mother's and boyfriend's affair.
