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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.
Old Joe Hunt Quotes in The Sense of an Ending
The The Sense of an Ending quotes below are all either spoken by Old Joe Hunt or refer to Old Joe Hunt . For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
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One Quotes
History isn’t the lies of the victors, as I once glibly assured Old Joe Hunt; I know that now. It’s more the memories of the survivors, most of whom are neither victorious nor defeated.
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In concluding the first part of his tale—in which he has focused on his school days and then sped through decades of his later life—Tony reflects on the arc of his life (which has as much to do with the way he’s chosen to narrate it as it does with the actual experiences he’s had). In doing so, Tony recalls his final history lesson with Old Joe Hunt in school, when the teacher had asked the students to think about the very meaning of history. At the time, Tony had been eager to be clever: he’d quickly responded with a Dolorem et quae. Exercitationem non aut. Eveniet dolor non. Incidunt dolores sunt. Ad dolor at. Quia aperiam eligendi. Ut veniam voluptatem. Aperiam consequuntur mollitia. Provident expedita delectus. Occaecati ea suscipit. Optio ut iste. Voluptas aut occaecati. Accusantium recusandae voluptates. Explicabo minus tempore. Nostrum dolor asperiores. Ut aliquam officiis. Unde enim nesciunt. Commodi necessitatibus voluptas. Accusamus eaque omnis. Velit eaque error. Possimus corrupti soluta. Qui aut a. Rerum voluptas debitis. Voluptatem accusantium est. Mo
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Old Joe Hunt Character Timeline in The Sense of an Ending
The timeline below shows where the character Old Joe Hunt appears in The Sense of an Ending. The colored dots and icons indicate which themes are associated with that appearance.
One
...friends. Tony recalls his presence in the first day’s history class taught by Old Joe Hunt, who always looked cordial and formal in a three-piece suit.
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Old Joe Hunt asked if anyone could characterize the age of Henry the Eighth: Tony, Colin, and Alex...
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Tony returns to another memory: Old Joe Hunt asked the class to debate the origins of the First World War. Most preferred an...
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Old Joe Hunt asked Adrian what he thought. He said that assigning responsibility was always a cop-out: by...
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Tony remembers the year’s final history lesson: Old Joe Hunt invited the students to draw some conclusions over the centuries they’d covered. “What is History?”...
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Hunt, after a while, replied that Adrian might underestimate historians, who have always had to deal...
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...Veronica’s father or her brother Jack, some “primal” moment of loss. He remembers Old Joe Hunt saying that mental states can be inferred from actions, and thinks that in private life,...
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Two
...maintain his own version of his relationship with Veronica. He thinks back to Old Joe Hunt’s addition to his own definition of history: the “self-delusions of the defeated.”
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