"The Sense of an Ending" is a brief history of the paradigm and some of its variations. Kermode's book is an impressively learned, eloquent and brilliant defense of a non-schismatic view of human time. "At some very low level"- biological or psychological- "we all share certain fictions about time, and they testify to the continuity of what is called human nature." Man's position existentially is intermediary; he is born and dies "in the middle of things." What Kermode calls "fictions" (in both literature and the rest of life) are those "coherent patterns" which, by providing or implying an ending, "make possible a satisfying consonance with the origins and with the middle." These temporal fictions "humanize the common death" and allow us to coexist with temporal chaos."
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June 11, 1967 Variations On a Paradigm By LEO BERSANI https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/books/00/06/25/specials/kermode-ending1.html
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Frank_Kermode
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Frank Kermode
Sir John Frank Kermode, FBA (29 November 1919 – 17 August 2010) was a British literary critic best known for his 1967 work The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction and for his extensive book-reviewing and editing.
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