Joe’s self-conscious crafting is impressive here because he consistently
interprets and evaluates his actions through his reconstruction of Clarissa’s
perspective at the time of the action. Rhetorical readers can’t, of course, know
for sure that he has captured her consciousness, but they can know that he
comes up with a plausible account and that the very effort is a sign of ethi-
cal generosity. At the same time, McEwan uses the passage—and the broader
scene—to demonstrate how Joe’s and Clarissa’s different responses to Parry are
creating a gap between them and that Joe is aware of the problem.
Now consider this passage from the end of the chapter:
Clarissa, aware that her remarks might not bear up under discussion, is
getting out while she’s ahead, leaving the room while it’s still delicious to
feel wronged. “Well, fuck off, then,” Joe shouts to her departing back. He
feels he wouldn’t mind picking up the dressing table stool and throwing it
through the window. He is the one who should be walking out. After some
seconds’ hesitation, he hurries out of the room, passing Clarissa in the hall-
way, snatches his coat from its peg, and goes out, slamming the door hard
behind him and glad that she was close by to hear its full force. (94)In this passage, Joe fails to sustain his effort to narrate from Clarissa’s per-
spective. Indeed, a closer look marks the trigger for the switch in Joe’s report of
his cursing, since it’s in the very next sentence that Joe fully moves back to his
own perspective. (Clarissa can’t know that he feels like picking up that stool,
since Joe doesn’t actually do that. And if there is any lingering doubt about
the switch, the next paragraph removes it, since it reports on Joe’s movements
after he leaves their flat.) Furthermore, Joe shows no awareness of his shift,
but instead seems to revel in his representation of himself as the aggrieved
party in their encounter. In other words, at this point, McEwan shows Joe not
only inadvertently losing sight of his purpose in the chapter but also erasing
the temporal difference between the experiencing-I and the narrating-I. The
effort to narrate the highly charged and emotionally difficult scene makes the
rational science writer lose rational control of his telling. Furthermore, despite
his best efforts, the rational science writer can’t help but betray his bias and
his interest in making himself look right and Clarissa wrong. I will return
to this point below. Finally, chapter 9 marks a significant turning point in
Joe’s narration: from this point forward, McEwan does not have Joe make any
explicit comments on his construction of the narration. Instead, McEwan has
Joe keep the primary focus on Joe’s perspective at the time of the action, with
occasional moves to Joe’s present-tense scientifically based reflections on such
issues as the way one’s self-interest guides one’s perceptions.
242 • CHAPTER 1 3