While he admires and seeks their approval, he also has a tendency to objectify these women or to take advantage of their feelings for him in order to feel better about himself, all the while playing innocent. Though awkward around women early in adulthood, he has several intense relationships with women over the course of his life. Throughout his life, Tony does retain certain qualities: he is wry and ironic, pleasant in company, and, as he dubs himself, “peaceable”-quick to deflate any situation in order to avoid confrontation. Tony is eager (and self-consciously so) to tell a certain story of his life, one in which he might appear in as positive a light as possible, and this complicates the ability to understand his character in any objective way. The protagonist of The Sense of an Ending is also its narrator: sixty-something years old when he is telling his story, he also appears as an adolescent and young man as Tony returns to memories of forty years earlier.
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