engagement with the narrative, and in so doing enrich its affective, ethical,
and aesthetic dimensions. The long answer follows.
APPENDIX I
The movement from Joe’s narrative to the scholarly article is a radical shift in
McEwan’s mode of telling, so radical that it is affectively jarring. To help con-
vey something of this effect, I will analyze the final section of Joe’s narrative
and the beginning of Wenn and Camia’s article. Joe reports that after James
Reid tells his story to Jean Logan, he asks for her forgiveness and then tries
to comfort her in her distress at not being able to ask for her own forgiveness
from John. Joe then continues:
I caught Clarissa’s eye and we exchanged a half-smile, and it was as if we
were pitching our own requests for mutual forgiveness, or at least tolerance,
in there with Jean’s and Reid’s frantic counterpoint. I shrugged as though to
say that, like her in her letter, I just did not know. (248)Although Joe describes small actions here—an exchange of glances, a half-
smile, a shrug—the scene is affectively and ethically poignant. McEwan uses
Joe’s reporting and interpreting to convey both the strong connection and the
deep rift between Clarissa and himself. They can understand each other with
just a look and a half-smile, but that very capacity for mutual understanding
only highlights their inability to forgive—or even tolerate—each other’s behav-
ior after Jed entered their lives. Joe’s shrug, which he assumes that Clarissa
will understand, nicely captures their plight, conveying doubt and uncertainty
with a paradoxical confidence that the communication will be understood.
On the ethical level, McEwan does not suggest that either character is more
sinned against than sinning: each has been partially deficient and each has
hurt the other, but neither of them has been fundamentally selfish or deliber-
ately hurtful. Although Joe’s shrug does not close off an eventual reunion, it
does not move them toward one, either. After rhetorical readers’ sympathetic
immersion in their struggles, Joe’s shrug pains those readers almost as much
as it pains Clarissa.
As noted above, McEwan gives his audience some final affective counter-
balance by continuing Joe’s narrative until it ends with a small scene of his
bonding with Jean Logan’s children. But even here, their turning to him as a
kind of surrogate father inevitably reminds the audience of the death of their
real father and Jean’s double grief over his loss and her misjudgment of his
248 • CHAPTER 1 3