Enduring Love

4 Pages 1054 Words

Emile Zola describes the role of the novelist as being like “a pathologist dissecting life with the book as a kind of experiment”. How does this illuminate our understanding of the first chapter of Enduring Love ?

If Ian McEwan is a pathologist dissecting life, with Enduring Love being the experiment, then he uses the narrator like a surgical tool to carry out the experiment and reveal the truth. The character who narrates the event of the balloon crashing and who is also part of the event itself is a scientist. This is clearly reflected in the views he holds on the event and the way in which he describes them to us.
The first paragraph of the chapter and so of the whole book is extremely interesting. McEwan begins “The beginning is easy to mark… We turned to look across the field and saw the danger. Next thing I was running towards it… I don’t recall dropping the corkscrew, or getting to my feet”. It is slightly ironic that he chooses to begin his novel with the line, “The beginning is easy to mark”. His words are reflected in the novel and also in the events the novel is to go on to describe. I believe he uses the first line to create a contrast with the rest of the chapter. Whilst he states that it was easy to mark the beginning of the event that was the balloon crash, he then chooses to skip backwards in time, going over some of the series of events immediately prior to the accident. It seems that he is trying to convey to the reader a sense that everything is not as simple as it may first seem, that all events have causes, effects and consequences and that they are an indivisible seri!
es of events that cannot be separated from one another. The fact that he is a scientist and his girlfriend is an English scholar does not seem to fit with the fact that it is he who runs impulsively towards the balloon whilst Clarissa merely “walks quickly”. This seems to suggest that scientific theories of materialism do n...