How Does Mcewan Tell the Story of 'Enduring Love' in Chapter 9?

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In this Chapter, Joe tells the story from Clarissa’s point of view and marks a narrative transition as we switch from a first-person narrative to a third-person one. However, with the change of perspective, the audience merely observes the plot from Joe’s restricted view of events, making the narrative within this chapter not entirely omniscient. Interestingly, Joe adopts a God-like position as editor of Clarissa’s story. Given his atheism, Joe’s attitude could be reflected as somewhat ironic. Joe admits he ‘construed’ Clarissa’s narrative but he does not explain how. This absence of explanation is predominantly strange, bearing in mind that a lot of narrative in earlier chapters concerned itself with metafiction. As readers we have to guess how this has been constructed. The impression that Joe has used Clarissa’s diary to create the narrative in the chapter is stood out by the list of events that occur in it. These events appear to be unexpected and unconnected to the other characters, so it deducts from the suspense. It is a disjointed account syntactically, as the tense switches from ‘she arrives’ into the past tense of ‘the student she supervised yesterday.’ Then the action slips back into more recent events, which once again stimulate very little, if any, tension. That changes when the next paragraph opens with ‘she lugs her bags.’ This time the tense remains in the present, giving Carissa’s needs a sense of urgency and immediacy. Using the sematic field of evolutionary science, she defines Joe as a ‘newly discovered talking ape.’ Strangely, this is the kind of terminology that is more typical of Joe than Clarissa. He seems to have stamped his mark on her narrative as well as his own, and it could relate to his unreliability as a narrator. Clarissa continues to use the same sematic field, describing Jessica’s Lowe’s husband as a ‘mate’ in the biological

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