Wallace (the police investigator): “Let’s talk about the ice creams. Your waiter
says he was bringing them to the table at the time of the shooting.”
Joe: “That’s not how I remember it. We started to eat them, then they
were covered in blood.”
“The waiter says the blood reached as far as him. The ice creams were
bloodied when he set them down.”
I said, “But I remember eating a couple of spoonfuls.” (196)Notice here how subtly McEwan’s communication to his audience differs from
Joe’s communication to his uncharacterized narratee. Joe’s focus on the details
of when the shooting began means that he does not comment on the discrep-
ancy between his earlier report that the dessert was sorbet and this conversa-
tion’s presupposition that the dessert is ice cream. In case his audience has
missed this discrepancy for the same reason as Joe, McEwan soon highlights
it through Joe’s reporting of additional dialogue:
Wallace was patiently repeating a question. “What flavor was the ice cream?”
“Apple. If the guy says it was anything else, then we’re talking about two
different waiters.”
“Your professor friend says vanilla.” (197)Since Joe has previously reported that the dessert was lime sorbet, the
authorial disclosure across conversations highlights both the discrepancy and
Joe’s complete unawareness of the discrepancy. Joe the self-conscious crafts-
man has become an unwittingly unreliable reporter of events. McEwan invites
his audience to infer that there is some kind of contagion going on: the ratio-
nal science writer is moving toward the kind of irrationality that governs Jed
Parry’s behavior. Furthermore, that irrationality exists both at the time of the
action and at the time of the narration.
McEwan uses these developments—Joe’s loss of control in chapter 9, his
descent into unreliability, and his larger efforts at self-justification—to indicate
that Clarissa’s reservations about Joe’s interpretations and evaluations of Parry
are well justified.^2 That communication, in turn, raises the issue of whether
McEwan wants his audience to regard Joe as reliable about the big picture.
Of course, the events at the end of the narrative—and the case study in the
scholarly article—settle that question very clearly in favor of reliability, but it’s
worth asking why McEwan wants his audience to entertain the possibility that
the local unreliability is a sign of unreliability about the big picture.
- For a debate on McEwan’s handling of Clarissa’s character, see Palmer, “Attributions”
and Phelan, “Cognitive.”
244 • CHAPTER 1 3