Enduring love chapter 3

Joe and Clarissa return home.

They re-iterate the events of the incident. They both make sense of the incident in polar opposite ways.

Joe beings to feel gulty. He begins to try to exonerate himself.

Vocabulary from the semantic field of religion has slipped into Joes lexis / narratorial style.

Joe keeps saying John L was a good man.

Joe and C sleep together.

The couple retell their story many times.

Jed calls in the night and tells Joe that he loves him. Joe lies to Clarissa about the call

"The ualtered array of my breakfast coffee cup and newspaper seemed blasphemous"

"... an element of ritual was in play". " It was deliverance"

" There was comfort in reiteration"

" I felt the sickness of guilt, something I couldn't yet bear to talk about. I showed Clarissa the rope on my hands"

" Along the narrative lines there were knots, tangles of horror ....."

" We were prisoners in a cell..."

" dream logic"

"But even as I felt the nausea of gult return, I was trying to convince myself I was right to let go"

" You're so rational sometimes you're like a child" 

" I love you more now I've seen you go completely mad... the rationalist cracks at last"

"

Joe

Uses theatrical language in order to distance himself from the emotional side of the incident " I had to repel an image of a dark house in Oxford, isolated, as if set in a desert, where from an upstairs window two baffled children watched their mother's sombre visitors to arrive". Also, depicts Joe as being rather heartless / devoid of emotion. Could bethe consequence of his rationalism.

 His avoidance of Clarissa because he assumed that ' affection was inappropriate, an indulgence characterizes him as being emotionally inept. ... In these situtaions emotion is what one needs,

His guilt is surfacing and it makes him seem slightly desperate in his attemps to exonerate himself [ insert quote] His attempt of exoneration makes the reader question his reliability as we question whether his accounts may just be to rid himself of blame.

Much religous lexis has seeped into his lexis. He uses this in his narrative. In spite of him attempts to seem like a rationalist through-and- through, perhaps it is all a facade as his walls have so easily been breached+ proleptic foreshadowing of the integral role Jed will play in his life in.

Contunous use of homodiegetic narration, but the reader finally gets to hear what Clarissa makes of the situation and it exposes the disparity between their dispositions.

Meta-narrative used the difficulty of accurately re-telling a story + retaining objectivity.

The theme of beginnings and the difficulty of understanding where they really begin is re-iterated.

Joe, in his narration, keeps going back to the incident and creates a sort of fragmented style of the chapter which is typical of the cubist form [ insert quote]

A compression of narrative time seems to occur. Two days have gone by  [ asyndetic listing of re - telling events represents this]  which greatly contrasts the first couple of chapters where there is an active effort to expand narrative time.

Events of this chapter occur within Joe and Clarissa's home.

Nothing seems to have changed. This irks Joe as he finds it difficult to undertsand how everything seems so normal  when so much has changed. [ First paragraph of this chapter] The effect perhaps to show that life must go on no matter what - typical of the post modern form.

We get Clarissa's POV for a little bit but her point of view is told through Joe= focalization. She uses literary references in order to rationalise the accident. 

Stories can often just a confabulation/ construction of truths, partial truths and things we wished were true. " .. like craftsmen at worl , grinding the jagged edge of memories, hammering the unspeakable into forms of word, threading single perceptions into narrative" + use of vocab from the semantic field of building