their relationship. Reid happens to hold the Euler Chair in Logic (!) at Oxford
University, and now that they have gone public, he will have to resign from
his position—but he is perfectly willing to do so.
By the end of Joe’s narrative, then, McEwan has used his audience’s immer-
sion in the concrete particularity of its multiple events as perceived through
Joe’s angle of vision and his thematizing of those events to complicate our
understanding of both Joe and Clarissa’s relationship and Jed and his condi-
tion. McEwan gives his audience a view that subsumes Joe’s. For Joe, Jed is
the erotomaniac who almost murdered him, who took Clarissa hostage, and
whose entrance into his life led to what looks to be the end of his happy life
with Clarissa. McEwan’s communication guides his audience to say, “Yes, but”
to Joe’s view, with an emphasis on both words. Yes, Jed and his erotomania
have wreaked havoc on Joe’s life, but that erotomania exists along the same
continuum of human relationships as the love between John and Jean Logan,
that between James Reid and Bonnie Deedes, and that between Joe and Cla-
rissa. Furthermore, despite where any couple is located on that continuum,
their relationship will depend on some gap between love and logic. For that
reason, Joe’s interest in apportioning out blame for the disruption of his rela-
tionship with Clarissa is an understandable but far too limited response to
the events. As for Jed’s obsession with Joe, yes, it is markedly different from
Joe’s love for Clarissa, but it is also an extreme version of it—just as Jed is an
extreme version of Joe. These “Yes, but” responses lead McEwan’s rhetorical
readers to contemplate the mystery of the relation between reason and feel-
ing, love and logic, without denying that at some point love’s unmooring from
logic can lead to destructive consequences.
As this account suggests, McEwan might well have made his novel wholly
coincident with Joe’s telling and satisfied many of his readers. To be sure, there
are loose ends: Joe’s narrative does not report on what happens to Jed, and it
leaves the future of Joe’s relationship with Clarissa undecided. In addition,
McEwan chooses to use Joe’s narration of that undecided state as the penulti-
mate rather than final passage of Joe’s narrative. He devotes the final passage
to a scene of Joe’s bonding with John and Jean Logan’s children. The scene
does give the ending a more positive feeling, but, given the very minor role
of the children in the narrative, their presence in this last scene is puzzling.
Still, such open-endedness and such a puzzle would be acceptable within
the postmodernist aesthetics of literary fiction in 1997, an aesthetics that
eschews strong resolutions. What value, then, does McEwan add by including
the two Appendices? The short answer is that these additional structural units
partially tie up loose ends, but even more, they complicate the interaction
between the mimetic and thematic components of the authorial audience’s
FUNCTIONS OF NARRATIVE SEgMENTS • 247