"Eggs as an Ending": Creative Project for Summer Reading

Text: Julian Barnes’s The Sense of an Ending

Essence: Although some may mask it with impressive oratory, all humans have the same rudimentary core.

Brief Summary: The Sense of an Ending chronicles the young adulthood and then older middle-age of Brit Tony Webster. While attending an elite private high school, he befriends Adrian Finn, a philosophical genius. One of their classmates commits suicide because he impregnates his girlfriend, an action Tony and Adrian condemn for being “inartistic.” Adrian himself commits suicide several years later, explaining it via a lofty philosophical treatise. Tony idolizes Adrian’s erudition and honorable death— but decades later discovers that he killed himself for the same “self-indulgent” reason as their former classmate: he accidentally fathered a child.

2009 Prompt: A symbol is an object, action, or event that represents something or that creates a range of associations beyond itself. In literary works a symbol can express an idea, clarify meaning, or enlarge literal meaning. Select a novel or play and, focusing on one symbol, write an essay analyzing how that symbol functions in the work and what it reveals about the characters or themes of the work as a whole. Do not merely summarize the plot.

Thesis: In Julian Barnes’ The Sense of an Ending, the egg Mrs. Ford cooks for Tony is a paradox representing the birth of their kinship, which also, according to Tony’s frayed logic, eventually leads to the death of Adrian. Adrian’s suicide is the greatest controversy of the novel.

Explanation:

As soon as I revisited The Sense of an Ending and saw its cover, I knew eggs would be integral in my creative representation of the novel. Eggs are introduced when Tony Webster, the protagonist of Julian Barnes’s work, receives cooked eggs from his girlfriend’s mother, Mrs. Ford. Mrs. Ford was much kinder to Tony than his actual girlfriend was, so when the relationship ends and he discovers that his friend Adrian is dating his ex, he tells him to “check things out with [her] Mum” (106). Adrian commits suicide not long after, and Tony eventually discovers that he did it because he accidentally got the mother pregnant. Tony’s logic becomes unhinged after this revelation, and he begins to blame himself since he “had urged Adrian to consult [the ex-girlfriend’s] mother. [He] replayed the words that would forever haunt [him]” (162). Therefore, although the egg symbolized the birth of Tony’s connection to the mother, according to his faulty rationale, it also caused the death of Adrian.

The egg has great notoriety as a symbol outside of the novel’s context. It’s central to the creation stories of ancient Egyptian, Polynesian, Chinese, and Greek mythology. In the ancient Greek Orphic tradition, the divine embodiment of light hatched from a silver egg and then created the rest of their gods. In more contemporary religions such as Christianity, an Easter egg in particular represents a paradox similar to the one I discovered in The Sense of an Ending. The egg resembles the massive boulder blocking Jesus’ tomb, but the fact that Jesus moved this boulder for the resurrection presents it as a symbol of birth and life.

Also notice that every Easter egg had the same skull inside, regardless of decoration on the outside. The notion of death as “the great equalizer” is also a motif here, as everyone, from the most basic (Robson) to the most sophisticated (Adrian) will all succumb to death. The result is the same, no matter your personality, integrity, or character. Death has been referred to as an equalizer since these passages in the Biblical book of Ecclesiastes: “All share a common destiny—the righteous and the wicked, the good and the bad, the clean and the unclean, those who offer sacrifices and those who do not... For the living know that they will die” (Eccl.9:2-3, 12-13). James Shirley, a late English Renaissance dramatist, wrote a poem titled, “Death the Leveller.” Its first stanza claims that despite their royal status, even kings are not immune from death.

“Death lays his icy hand on kings:  

                         Sceptre and crown        

                        Must tumble down,  

And in the dust be equal made  

With the poor crooked scythe and spade.”

The egg symbol has added significance in the context of The Sense of an Ending. During adolescence, the boys anxiously await entry into “the real world,” like chicks eager to hatch from their eggs. Tony reflected: “In those days, we imagined ourselves as being kept in some kind of holding pen, waiting to be released into our lives” (10). But admission into adulthood is what led to their undoing: Tony begins to feel a feeling “somewhere between self-pity and self-hatred…about [his] whole life” because he “had lost the friends of [his] youth” and had “abandoned the ambitions [he] had entertained” as a student (109). The anticipation of the hatch relates to the nostalgic notion of adolescence in the late twentieth to early twenty-first century, upper-middle class England, the setting of The Sense of an Ending. Adolescence is the period in which chicks eagerly anticipate the freedom of the hatch, but reality is that adulthood will actually only lead to grave sorrow.

The act of hunting for Easter eggs also relates to the deeper culture of the novel. When describing his elite preparatory school, Tony states that “the genteel social Darwinism of the English middle classes has always remained implicit” (9). This phrase encapsulates the jealousy that simmered beneath the surface of his camaraderie with the intellectually-superior Adrian Finn.  Tony and his friends subtly envy not only his intelligence, but the fact that “the only person…whose life so far contained anything remotely novel-worthy was Adrian” (16). My Easter egg hunt embodies the preference for competition over cooperation among the teenage protagonists of The Sense of an Ending. Before the discovery of the sparkling egg, those who found normal eggs were satisfied with themselves and their findings. But once the sparkling egg was revealed, the other eggs seemed duller and less noteworthy in comparison. Adrian’s introduction provided a new gauge of impossible standards for Tony and the rest of his friends to measure their own success.

Bibliography:

"Creation Stories." Myth Encyclopedia. Advameg, Inc. Web. 23 Sept. 2014.

"Ecclesiastes 9:2-3." Bible Hub. Biblos.com. Web. 23 Sept. 2014.

"Easter Symbols and Traditions." History.com. A E Networks, 1 Jan. 2009. Web. 23 Sept. 2014.

Shirley, James. ""Death the Leveller"" Bartleby. Web. 23 Sept. 2014.