Enduring Love: My Thoughts (Part 2)

If you have not read Enduring Love and chanced upon this post, please skip reading it (the post, not the book!).

Three days after reading it, I’m still thinking about the story, and I kept going back to my notes, so I’m going to lay this to rest and share my thoughts here as an extension of the first post.

In Enduring Love, chance plays a central role in the story. The balloon accident, a random and tragic event, sets the plot in motion and changes all the characters’ lives. Ian McEwan uses this to-here’s how I interpret it—to meditate on how people impose narratives (rational or otherwise) to make sense of events that may, in fact, be meaningless or chaotic. The novel is largely in Joe’s voice, so readers experience both his reliability and his growing unreliability as his world unravels.

I really like Joe’s character, and right at the start of the story, I was drawn to the way he thinks and expresses himself. After the balloon incident, he attempts to break down the events step by step, isolating the causes and suppressing his emotional response. This seems to give him comfort and a sense of control, but it also makes him seem detached and sometimes insensitive to others, especially Clarissa. His commitment to rationalism makes him seek logical and analytical explanations even in such a traumatic event. I believe readers—myself included—can see how the rationalist approach both helps and limits him, as it allows him to act decisively but hinders him from fully processing his trauma or engaging emotionally with others.

I’m also drawn to Clarissa, mainly for her emotional intelligence and love for Keats—I mentioned the latter briefly in my earlier post. Joe and Clarissa are portrayed as intellectual equals but emotional opposites. Clarissa relies on intuition and empathy, while Joe defaults to analysis and reason. Personally, I love the dynamic between them, and I believe this is what initially attracts them to one another. Still, after the balloon accident, and when Jed comes into the picture, disrupting this dynamic, I begin to see a breach and their inability to communicate across this divide. As Joe becomes increasingly preoccupied with Jed, Clarissa interprets his reactions as paranoia or emotional withdrawal, leading to misunderstanding and estrangement.

Jed’s relentless and irrational obsession tests the very limits of Joe’s rational worldview. Jed’s fixation is rooted in faith and delusion, not reason, so Joe’s attempts to logically dissuade or confront him fail. What happens on page 19 sets the ball rolling and becomes the emotional core (or chaos) of the novel:

[…] It was a random matter, who was alive or dead at any given time. I happened to be alive. This was when I noticed Jed Parry watching me. His long bony face was framed round a pained question. He looked wretched, like a dog about to be punished. In the second or so that this stranger’s clear grey-blue eyes held mine I felt I could include him in the self-congratulatory warmth I felt in being alive. It even crossed my mind to touch him comfortingly on the shoulder. My thoughts were up there on the screen: this man is in shock. He wants me to help him.

Had I known what this glance meant to him at the time, and how he was to construe it later and build around it a mental life, I would not have been so warm. […]

Jed embodies the irrational, which Joe cannot control or understand through science alone. This undermines Joe’s sense of safety, making him question his own perceptions or even leading others, such as the police and Clarissa, to doubt his versions of events. Jed’s obsession (he thinks Joe is leading him on—Joe’s the one who loves him) drives Joe toward paranoia, frustration, and ultimately, psychological crisis. The obsession depicted here is obsessive love through Jed’s fixation on Joe (presented as pathological and destabilizing), and Joe, in turn, becomes obsessed with understanding or escaping Jed and convincing others of his danger (mirroring Jed’s own compulsions in a distorted way). I thoroughly enjoyed reading Jed’s letters to Joe, especially the first letter in Chapter 11. Frankly, I’m drawn to the way Jed expresses himself—there’s a sort of poetic voice to it.

I see Joe’s feelings of apprehension, fear, and guilt evolve throughout the novel. He initially tries to “diagnose” his unease by analyzing if it’s guilt, fear, or something more ambiguous like foreboding. He intellectualizes his reactions, seeking specific words and scientific explanations. Joe’s feelings grow more and more acute and less manageable as Jed’s pursuits intensify and his relationship with Clarissa unravels. Joe’s rational defenses are eroded by ongoing stress, isolation, and the feeling of being misunderstood. He now fears for his safety and sanity.

What I gathered at the end is that neither reason nor emotion alone is sufficient for understanding or coping with life’s uncertainties. Enduring Love questions the possibility of truly understanding another, the durability (and limitations) of love, and the elusive nature of reality. Especially so when filtered through trauma, obsession, and the limits of rationality.