The Human Story

Stories are theological. And because they are theological, they are also anthropological. They tell us about God—or the gods—and they tell us about ourselves. Human beings could not do otherwise than tell stories to one another, about one another. And the impulse to narrate immediately invokes beginnings, middles and ends, and makes any number of implicit and explicit assumptions about how these come to pass. What kind of creature is the human creature? And what kind of universe does it inhabit—is it purposeful, chaotic, or locked in by unyielding fate? What meaning can we then ascribe to human actions? Different kinds of stories give us different answers to these questions.

The Sense of an Ending 1

The English novelist Julian Barnes’s 2011 novel The Sense of an Ending is the brief narrative of Tony Webster, a very average middle-class protagonist in his sixties at the time of the story. The narrative concerns Webster’s memories of his friend Adrian’s suicide some…