Enduring Love chapter 1 to 4

Enduring Love chapter 1 to 4

1. Key Events

   • Chapter 1
     • picnic and balloon accident Joe concerntrates on his and Clarissa's romance
     • John Logan dies, all the men let go of the balloon
     • The first meeting with Jed
   • Chapter 2
     • McEwan deliberately aiming for suspense through the halting, teasing narrative?
     • Joe begins the next chapter by trying to slow down his story, thinking about whether this is the beginning, and contemplating the artificial nature of beginnings.
     • Joe and Jed go and find Johns dead body and they have their first conversation. Joe refuses to pray with Jed as he is an athiest
       • this difference in beliefs helps set the conflict
     • Joe retreats to science to explain the tragedy. He also says that he wasn't the first to let go of the balloon and therefore wasn't responsible for Johns death
   • Chapter 3 +4
     • Joe explains that a routine surgery left Clarissa unable to bear children and that, although they are happy together, it is clear she carries that pain with her.
     • Joe and Clarissa arrive at their apartment where they exchange their experiences of the tragedy
     • Clarissa loves children, and when her friend’s infant died unexpectedly, Clarissa treated it almost as if it were her own “phantom” child.
     • the telephone rings. Jed Parry says to him, “I just wanted you to know, I understand what you’re feeling. I feel it too. I love you” (pg. 37). Clarissa asks Joe who was calling, and he claims it was a wrong number, admitting to the reader that it was his “first serious mistake”
     • Joe notices someone following him in the library

2. Key Quotes

   • Chapter 1
     • "We turned to look across the field and saw the danger.Next thing , I was running towards it"
     • "This was the moment,this was the pinprick on the time map"
     • "The beginning is simple to mark"
   • Chapter 2
     • ‘So much followed from this incident, so much branching and subdivision began in those early moments, such pathways of love and hatred blazed from this starting position, that a little reflection, even pedantry, can only help me here.
     • ‘Like a self in a dream I was both first and third persons.
   • Chapter 3 + 4
     • Clarissa compares the falling Logan to a line of John Milton from Paradise Lost: “Hurled headlong flaming from th’Ethereal Sky” metaphor for her and joes relationship.
     • “was a challenge that no angel could resist, and his death denied their existence”
     • “recount the events without re-living them in the faintest degree, without even remembering them”