CHAPTER 13
Occasions of Narration and the
Functions of Narrative Segments in
Enduring Love
239I
N THIS CHAPTER, I move away from focusing primarily on explicit some-
bodies who tell (narrators and characters) in order to take up two resources
of narrative communication that deserve more attention from narra-
tive theorists: occasions of narration and narrative segments. Ian McEwan’s
Enduring Love provides a rich site for this exploration for several reasons.
McEwan constructs the novel in three segments, each with different tellers
situated in different occasions, and he constructs synergies among tellers,
segments, and occasions that are crucial to his overall communication to rhe-
torical readers. The novel is also a rich site because McEwan overtly down-
plays the significance of the final two segments by labeling them “Appendix
I” and “Appendix II” while covertly signaling their importance in the overall
progression.
More specifically, I shall consider the implied occasions of (a) the first,
longest segment, Joe Rose’s tale of how the erotomaniac Jed Parry disrupted
Joe’s relationship with his partner of seven years, Clarissa Mellon; (b) Appen-
dix I, a fictional scholarly essay by Robert Wenn and Antonio Camia (the sur-
names are an anagram for Ian McEwan) on erotomania in which the events of
Joe’s narrative are treated as a case study; and (c) Appendix II, an undelivered
love letter from Jed to Joe, written from the hospital to which Jed has been
committed after the events of Joe’s story. In analyzing Joe’s narrative, I shall
discuss how its occasion relates to Joe’s purpose in telling his story and to the