The sense of an ending,Characters,

1. CHARACTERS IN
THE SENSE OF
AN ENDING

2. Tony Webster
■ Tony (Anthony)Webster is
narrator Of the story. Tony is
a man ,sixty years old when
he is telling his story . He
returns to memories of forty
years earlier in his final year
of secondary school. He
gone to Bristol University
after completing schooling.
He has a girlfriend called
Veronica but their
relationship fails In some
acrimony.

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Tony's narration of the second part of the novel -
which is twice as long as the first - begins, with
the arrival of a lawyer's letter informing him that
Veronica's mother has bequeathed him £500 and
two documents. These lead him to re-establish
contact with Veronica and after a number of
meetings with her, to re-evaluate the story he has
narrated in the first part.

4. Veronica Mary Elizabeth Ford
■ She is Tony’s first girlfriend and
studying in Bristol University when
the two of them meet. She ditches
Tony for Adrian. She likes poetry ,
music etc..and comes from a
rather well-off family. She has
closer relationship with her father
and brother rather than her
mother. She had done break- up
with Tony and begins dating with
Adrian. She is the character in the
novel who seems to have
responsibility for other people
more than anyone else.

5. Adrian Finn
■ Adrian joins Tony’s friends group
but remains at a certain distance
from the others. The
brightest,most intellectual and
most self assured member of
group. He bonded over
history,philosophy,and bona most
at an English boy’s school in the
1960s. He goes to Cambridge and
builds relationship with his friend
Tony’s girlfriend Veronica. Months
latter he committed suicide and
his body was found behind a
locked door.

6. Continue..
■ He leaves a note addressed to the coroner saying
that the thinking person has a philosophical duty
to examine the nature of their life, and may then
choose to renounce it.By the end of the novel it
seems that Adrian may have done so for more
concrete reasons ,he slept with his girlfriend’s
mother and make her pregnant.

7. Mrs.Sarah Ford
■ mother, Sarah Ford is a housewife in Kent where she lives with
her family. Tony remembers her as a carefree, easily laughing
woman, who warns him not to let her daughter take advantage
of him. She turns out to be far more enigmatic than that: Sarah
Ford ends up sleeping with her daughter’s new boyfriend,
Adrian, and has a child by him. Her motives and mental state
remain hidden throughout the novel, as well as the real reasons
she left Adrian’s diary and five hundred pounds to Tony.
Perhaps, it’s implied, she felt trapped by her situation; perhaps
she wanted Tony to know the truth and to feel responsibility; it’s
possible that she is also the greatest manipulator and deceiver
in the novel.

8. Mr.Ford
■ A civil servant, Veronica’s father picks up Tony from the
train station during his visit to the family home and,
like Jack, seems to Tony to treat him with a jokey
demeanor that barely hides his scorn. Veronica’s
(unnamed) father is a heavy drinker and eventually dies
of complications from alcoholism; this is one of the
possible sources of distress and tension in Veronica’s
family that Tony doesn’t spend too much time thinking
about, even when he casually calls Veronica “damaged.”

9. Jack Ford
■ Veronica’s brother and a Cambridge student like Adrian,
Jack is casual and sardonic, treating Tony with rather
unconcerned bemusement during the weekend Tony
spends at the family’s home. Tony feels insecure around
Jack, due in part to his Cambridge education and in part
to his privileged background. In fact, in many ways Jack
and Tony are similar in their “unseriousness,” which is
something that Adrian finds frustrating about both of
them.

10. Margaret
■ Margaret is whom to Tony meets through his job (in
arts administration) and with whom he has one child,
Susie. Margaret eventually leaves him for a
restaurant owner, who in turn leaves her; she and
Tony subsequently become friends. Although Tony
claims that their relationship is fully platonic, and that
Margaret would never want to get back together with
him, that claim is contradicted in both explicit and
subtle ways throughout the story.

11. Susie
■ Margaret and Tony’s only daughter, Susie is
grown up and married herself by the time Tony
begins his story. By coming to understand the
situation with Adrian’s son, however, Tony comes
to appreciate the fact that Susie has been able to
live a full, independent life.

12. Adrian’s Son
■ A forty-something man around the time Tony begins
telling his story, this Adrian doesn’t have his identity
revealed until the very end of the novel. He is mentally
ill and needs to be under constant care. Eventually
Tony realizes that the man is Adrian’s son, but it takes
much more time to realize that he is not Adrian’s son
with Veronica, but rather with Veronica’s mother (Sarah
Ford).

13. Old Joe Hunt
■ The history teacher at Tony’s school, Old Joe Hunt
wears a three-piece suit and maintains a slightly wry,
distanced air with his students. Although Tony
describes his classes as somewhat, though not
excessively, boring, the conversations held during
history class—about causality and historical
responsibility, as well as about the very possibility of
defining history—linger in his mind for the rest of his
life.

14. Phil Dixon
■ The literature teacher at Tony’s school, Phil Dixon
is a young, recent Cambridge grad whom the
students adore. He uses the New Criticism
method that involves sharing a poem with
students without identifying information, and
asking them to determine what it means devoid of
any contexts.

15. Robson
■ A student in the “Science Sixth” at Tony’s school,
Robson never appears directly in the novel, but is
a significant reference point for Tony and his
friends after he commits suicide, having gotten his
girlfriend pregnant. The boys view his suicide as
less a tragic event than an opportunity for them to
speculate endlessly and abstractly on his reasons
and motives

16. Minor characters
■ Colin
■ A school friend of Tony’s, Colin shares his jokey, ironic
attitude, though coupled with true intellectual interests
(he’s a fan of nineteenth-century European authors like
Baudelaire and Dostoyevsky). Colin embraces an
anarchic view of the universe according to which there’s
no ultimate meaning, and everything is left to chaos.

17. Alex
■ Another member of Tony’s friend group at school, Alex is
considered the philosopher among them
before Adrian joins the group. He’s also the friend that
shares the details of Adrian’s suicide with Tony, who was
traveling around the United States when it happened.

18. Parents of Tony
■ Tony’s Mother
■ A minor character in the novel, Tony’s mother appears most
notably after Adrian’s suicide, when she suggests that he was too
clever—that he reasoned his way out of common sense—and
deeply angers Tony.
■ Tony’s Father
■ Also a source of Tony’s frustration after Adrian dies, when he
doesn’t know what to say or how to act in order to comfort his son.

19. Marshall
■ A student in Old Joe Hunt’s history class
who is depicted as slower-thinking and less
clever than Tony and his friend.

20. Brown
■ A student of the Maths Sixth who spreads
the rumor that Robson killed himself
because his girlfriend became pregnant (a
rumor that Tony and the others
subsequently accept as fact)