"Julian Barnes is a contemporary postmodern writer. He was educated at Magdalen College, Oxford and started his career first as a journalist. He is sometimes called the chameleon of British literature for his ability to play with prose not giving the reader a clearly understandable explanation at the very beginning. This is also the case of his latest novel The Sense of an Ending (2011) which was awarded the prestigious Man Booker Prize for best fiction of 2011. The novel, whose title itself is based on the work of Frank Kermode, who studied the phenomenon of human perception of time, works a lot with concepts of memory and history. In fact, these two concepts, closely related, permit Barnes to use the postmodern technique of building a slightly confusing narrative. In my essay, I would like to discuss the use of this technique in the novel in order to give a clearly understandable explanation of the story.
The narrative itself is divided into two parts - the 1960s and the present. In the first part we meet the narrator TONY WEBSTER as a young schoolboy who is part of a class clique: Adrian, Tony, Colin, and Alex. Adrian is considered the smartest by everyone. He has a natural talent for philosophy and wins a scholarship to study Moral Sciences at Cambridge University. Tony, who is less smart than Adrian and often looks up to him, is accepted at Bristol University to read History. They swear to become friends forever. However, their friendship is broken when Tony discovers that Adrian started to date his ex-girlfriend Veronica.
Full of anger, bitterness and despise Tony writes a resentful letter to Adrian where he explains him the moral corruptness of the girl as well as her conduct towards himself, which was slightly arrogant and sometimes very mysterious. He also gives him the advice to consult Veronica's real character. In fact, this decision turns out to be not a very fortunate one leading Adrian to rather a tragic ending. When Tony learns of his friend's betrayal, he decides to forget this chapter of his life, deletes Veronica and Adrian from his life and moves on. However, later on when Tony learns of Adrian's suicide, he is crushed. He wants to find out the circumstances of this unhappy event, because he feels that he might be partly responsible for the death of his friend. This is the end of the first part of the story."

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