shift in his tale from self-consciousness and reliability to unself-consciousness
and unreliability; I shall also consider the relation between Joe’s purpose in
his telling and McEwan’s purpose in his. In addressing the Appendices, I shall
focus on how they function not as appendages to the novel but as integral
parts of McEwan’s telling. To put this point another way, although Joe Rose’s
narrative has two Appendices, McEwan’s Enduring Love has none. More gen-
erally, McEwan’s strategy enables him to combine the effects arising from his
three distinctively different tellings with the effects arising from their inter-
action in order to give his rhetorical readers a powerful affective and ethical
experience that ultimately serves one of his main thematic purposes: explor-
ing the vexed nature of the relationship between love and logic.^1 Since the
nature and consequences of McEwan’s strategy become most evident in the
Appendices, I will give substantial attention to them.
THE THREE TELLINGS IN ENDURING LOVE
I start with three initial observations about McEwan’s three tellings. The third
merely states the obvious, but I include it because I believe that the effects that
follow from it are not so obvious.
(1) The authors of each telling remain ignorant of the existence of the oth-
ers, and thus, McEwan’s design for his novel foregrounds the importance of
the overarching relationships between implied author and authorial and actual
audiences, since only McEwan and his readers have access to all three texts. In
other words, McEwan’s structural design foregrounds the difference between
Joe’s story and McEwan’s larger novel. In that way, Enduring Love is a close
relative of the novel-within-a-novel design he will later employ in Atonement.
(2) McEwan does not present the three tellings in the temporal order of
their composition. Jed’s letter is written one thousand days after he’s been hos-
pitalized, and since McEwan tells his audience in a note preceding the letter
that a photocopy of it was forwarded to Dr. Wenn, we can infer that Wenn
obtained it while doing his research, and thus, that the scholarly essay itself
was published at some point after that. Furthermore, since Joe’s narration ends
shortly after Jed’s arrest, we know that it came first. Thus, the fabula order is
- As the critical commentary on the novel amply demonstrates, McEwan has other
important thematic purposes, including exploring conflicts among scientific, literary, and reli-
gious worldviews (Greenberg), the powers and limits of narrative itself (Greenberg, Randall,
Edwards, and Malcolm), the problem of other minds (Green), and masculinity under pressure
(Jago Morrison, Davies).
240 • CHAPTER 1 3