more, the interaction also points to a significant similar shortcoming in each
narrative. Each teller’s framework of experience (Joe’s close encounters with
Jed; Wenn and Camia’s psychiatry) locks him/them into a particular perspec-
tive on Jed. Yes, each one’s perspective yields some useful understanding about
Jed and his condition, but each one’s perspective also remains limited.
This “Yes, but” also applies to the article’s final sentences:
Patients with delusional disorders are unlikely to seek help, since they do
not regard themselves as ill. Their friends and family may also be reluctant
to see them in these terms, for as Mullen & Pathe observe, “the pathological
extensions of love not only touch upon but overlap with normal experience,
and it is not always easy to accept that one of our most valued experiences
may merge into psychopathology.” (259)While the quotation from Mullen and Pathe, who are real scholars of eroto-
mania, articulates McEwan’s thematic point, the thrust of the article, with its
emphasis on the syndrome as a “nosological entity,” and its exclusively the-
matic treatment of Jed, Joe, and Clarissa, is that those who suffer from ero-
tomania exist on the other side of a vast divide from their “victims.” After
signaling that Wenn and Camia reduce the human complexity of Jed and oth-
ers who suffer from the disease throughout the essay, McEwan invites his rhe-
torical readers to find an unintentional irony in Wenn and Camia’s conclusion.
McEwan’s choice to use Wenn and Camia’s article to deliver new infor-
mation about Jed and about Joe and Clarissa highlights other effects that
arise from the interaction between his structural units. The article informs
McEwan’s audience that Jed still suffers from erotomania, that he has been
assigned to a secure mental hospital from which he writes daily to Joe, and
that his letters are never delivered “in order to protect R from further distress”
(255). From the perspective of Wenn and Camia, this information is impor-
tant because it shows that the state has done what it needs to in P’s case. From
the perspective of rhetorical readers, the information is important because
it resolves their lingering questions about Jed’s fate, questions that Joe’s nar-
rative, with its preoccupation with Jed’s effect on him and Clarissa, raises
but does not answer. Furthermore, the specifics of the resolution lead McE-
wan’s rhetorical readers to a more layered response than Wenn and Camia’s,
a response that includes an affective dimension missing from theirs. Yes, the
so-subtle synthetic wink by scrambling the letters of his own name to come up with names for
the authors of the article. This wink further increases the audience’s affective distance to Jed,
Joe, and Clarissa and, thus, further sharpens the audience’s focus on the characters’ thematic
functions.
FUNCTIONS OF NARRATIVE SEgMENTS • 251