Stemming from a long tradition of Christian apocalyptic thought, we now have the idea that the beginning was a golden age. Humans have always used such 'fictions' to impose structure on the idea of eternity, including Homer, Augustine of Hippo and Plato. In order to make sense of our lives we need to find some 'consonance' between the beginning, the middle, and the end. We look for a 'coherent pattern' to explain this fact, and invest in the idea that we find ourselves in the middle of a story. So much has gone before us and so much will come after us. Kermode claims that humans are deeply uncomfortable with the idea that our lives form only a short period in the history of the world. The book originated in the Mary Flexner Lectures, given at Bryn Mawr College in 1965 under the title 'The Long Perspectives'.Īfter epigraphs from William Blake and Peter Porter, Kermode begins: "It is not expected of critics as it is of poets that they should help us to make sense of our lives they are bound only to attempt the lesser feat of making sense of the ways in which we try to make sense of our lives." This is what he then sets out to do in the book. It was first published in 1967 by Oxford University Press. The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction is the most famous work of the literary scholar Frank Kermode.
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