McEwan provides an answer in his implicit communications about the
temporal occasion and the purpose of Joe’s narrative, especially as that tem-
poral occasion lines up with the occasions of the two appendices. Temporality
first.
At the end of his narrative, Joe reports that he and Clarissa are living apart
and that it is uncertain whether they will be able to forgive each other for what
they each regard as the other’s hurtful behavior during the period when Jed
disrupted their lives. In the case study of Appendix I, Drs. Wenn and Camia
report that “R and M were reconciled and later successfully adopted a child”
(259). Notice that the “and later” suggests that Joe and Clarissa had a period,
albeit one whose duration is not specified, in which they once again lived
together before adopting a child and that the child has also been living with
them for some duration, again not fully specified. In Appendix II, McEwan
includes the information that Dr. Wenn had requested Jed’s letter and that
the letter was written on the one thousandth day of Jed’s incarceration in the
prison hospital. If we allow time for the completion of the article, its going
through first the review process and then the production process, we can infer
that the scholarly essay is published approximately four to five years after the
end of Joe’s story. In combination with Joe’s ending his story by noting that
both he and Clarissa “just did not know” (248) about their future, the Appen-
dices indicate that Joe’s own telling was shortly after the events it recounts.
This inference has implications for our understanding of his purpose.
Because Joe is so close to the events, because their outcome remains
uncertain, and because the events have been so traumatic, his decline from
self-conscious reliable narrator to unwitting unreliable and even somewhat
irrational narrator makes good psychological sense. The rational narration of
the conscious craftsman gives way to the in-the-moment interpretations and
evaluations of the middle-aged man under pressure from Jed, from Clarissa,
and from himself, and he still suffers some of the effects of that pressure at
the time of the telling.
But why does Joe tell this story to his uncharacterized narratee? Because
the rational scientist whose stock-in-trade is narrative wants to understand
what happened to him and Clarissa under the pressure of Jed’s erotomania.
He wants to get underneath the sequence of events and their surface causal
links to deeper issues. Joe might have called his story “How Joe and Clarissa
Came Apart” or “Why Our Allegedly Enduring Love May Not Endure.” But
because Joe is so close to the events, he also cannot help but give his audience
his own sense of being more sinned against than sinning. So, a more accurate
title would be “How Clarissa and I Came Apart and How It Was Mostly Not
My Fault.” Because he still suffers from the contagion of Jed’s madness, he
FUNCTIONS OF NARRATIVE SEgMENTS • 245