Which narration seems more “reliable”?

Chapter Nine of Enduring Love switches narration from first person through the novel’s main character, Joe, to a third person narrative.

When a central figure is telling the story using “I” the reader is aware of their inner thoughts. A sense of intimacy and personal understanding for Joe comes across as we directly experience what he goes through (we feel we “are” Joe’s character) and are able to obtain a clearer insight of his feelings which we may otherwise not know about.

However, there are disadvantages of using first person narrative, involving issues such as the trustworthiness of the narrator, and the limitations of understanding the other characters as we focus on only one person’s interpretations of events. This bias can be avoided using a third person narrator, who in Chapter Nine is omniscient of both Joe and Clarissa’s thoughts:

“She is already wondering if she has gone too far.”

If this extract was written in first person speech, we would not know what she was really thinking. However it does seem unrealistic to know the thoughts of every character as in real life we ar

Their argument is interesting to study as it shows how Joe behaves in an unusual situation (“They rarely row”,) and displays new emotions in the normally calm character.

McEwan describes first person narrative as looking “over the shoulder” into the current scene. In this chapter we seem to take a step back and can therefore look at Joe’s character from a different perspective. Joe comes across far more persistent than we have ever seen him. Described as a “non-stop talking ape”, he babbles on at Clarissa about his thoughts as soon as they enter his head, quickly jumping between different topics from Jed to “getting back into science”.

Joe could be thought of as unreliable when his descriptions are shaped by his opinions. For example, Joe shows a biased account of the argument in Chapter Ten because he is feeling angry and self-pitying. As he is telling us what happened immediately after the row, he is bound to still be affected by it. The transformation to first person narrative takes us back into his inner thoughts, although we see him differently now having stepped out of them to consider Clarissa’s feelings. Now when he tells us “she failed to support” him against Jed we know that this is not entirely true, but that Joe might say this in the heat of the moment and possibly think this isn’t a fair comment on Clarissa when he is calm enough to think straight.

The reader also has a better understanding of Joe when they hear others who know him well describe him. Joe’s face showing the look of “usually stupid plans” is one example.

e only conscious of our own-and other peoples if they say them out loud.

The chapter concentrates on an argument between the couple so it important for the scene to be read from an outsider’s view, explaining both sides of the argument. This avoids a first person narrative persuading the reader that their own attitudes are right or distorting the events by their personal views-allowing the reader to make an unbiased opinion of the situation. For example, in Chapter Ten, we hear Joe confidently claiming he was “so obviously, incontrovertibly right”. If Ian McEwan had written the previous chapter in Joe’s n

Some topics in this essay:
Chapter Nine, Ian McEwan, Enduring Love, Joe Clarissa’s, Chapter Ten, Chapter Six, person narrative, chapter nine, third person, mcewan describes, story using “i”, third person narrative, narrative bias, joe’s character, story using, written third person, using “i”, own words, person narrator,