“Enduring Love” by Ian McEwan (post 4): Protagonist, who continues to have a split consciousness, is “the world’s most complicated simpleton”

In the rest of chapter one and chapter two, the protagonist makes two more mentions of his divided consciousness. Recall that he had previously seemed to see himself from two hundred feet up (1, p. 1). Next, he reports that when he had met Clarissa earlier that day (prior to the day’s traumatic event), he had imagined that “I was another man, my own sexual competitor, come to steal her from me. When I told her, she laughed and said I was the world’s most complicated simpleton…” (1, p. 5). Later, in the aftermath of the man’s fall to his death from the balloon, he says, “Like a self in a dream, I was both first and third persons, I acted, and saw myself act” (1, p. 21).

The first and the third instances might be explained away as his response to a traumatic situation. But there was no such situation when he had met Clarissa earlier that day. And her laughing comment that he was “the world’s most complicated simpleton” may mean that this was the kind of thing that she had come to expect of him.

1. Ian McEwan. Enduring Love. New York, Nan A. Talese/Doubleday, 1997.