![]() Instead she saw her room, long, white, subdued, with the coloured notebooks on the trestle table. So try again: Who am I, Anna? Now she did not think of Janet, but shut her out. But that’s terrible, she thought, her fear becoming worse. What then am I, Anna? - something that is necessary to Janet. She was thinking: If someone cracks up, what does that mean? At what point does a person about to fall to pieces say: I’m cracking up? And if I were to crack up, what form would it take? Anna, Anna, I am Anna, she kept repeating and anyway, I can’t be ill or give way, because of Janet I could vanish from the world tomorrow, and it wouldn’t matter to anyone except to Janet. Those fishermen in Scotland were a different species from the coalminers I stayed with in Yorkshire and both come from a different world than the housing estate outside London. Inside this country, Britain, the middle-class have no knowledge of the lives of the working-people, and vice-versa and reports and articles and novels are sold across the frontiers, are read as if savage tribes were being investigated. It is a blind grasping out for their own wholeness, and the novel-report is a means towards it. Human beings are so divided, are becoming more and more divided, and more subdivided in themselves, reflecting the world, that they reach out desperately, not knowing they do it, for information about other groups inside their own country, let alone about groups in other countries. The novel has become a function of the fragmented society, the fragmented consciousness. Introspective, sensual, amorous, and deeply intelligent, Allie’s journey demonstrates just how important passion, instinct, and a surrender to the power of love can be in the course of one’s life.Most novels, if they are successful at all, are original in the sense that they report the existence of an area of society, a type of person, not yet admitted to the general literate consciousness. Though the older Allie loses her memories of the love she and Noah once shared, it is ultimately revealed that she and Noah together composed a notebook containing the story of their romance-and when Noah reads it to Allie, she often returns to herself and enjoys fleeting moments in which her memories come back and guard her against the pain of her encroaching mortality. ![]() In the frame story of the novel, the older Allie is suffering from Alzheimer’s disease and is forced to reckon with the unhappy intersection of memory, pain, and mortality. Allie’s character arc ties in with all of the novel’s major themes: as a young woman she confronts ideas of love, destiny, and social class. Together, Noah and Allie have four children, and Noah supports Allie in her career as a renowned painter. Despite Allie’s mother, Anne’s, resignations about Noah and Allie’s own internal conflict, she ultimately chooses to be with Noah instead of Lon-they’ve been married for 49 years in the novel’s frame story. But as she reunites with Noah and gets to know him anew, she becomes more confident in herself more romantic and instinctual in her words and actions and more connected to the carefree, artistic, spiritual young girl she once was. As Allie journeys to New Bern, she is anxious and uncertain about what she’s doing and where her life is headed. Allie becomes determined to seek him out and tell him about her engagement to the wealthy and powerful Raleigh lawyer Lon Hammond, Jr. ![]() Though it has been 14 years since that summer at the start of the novel, Allie finds herself pulled toward memories of Noah after seeing an article about his renovation of a sprawling house in New Bern, North Carolina. The narrative switches between Noah and Allie’s perspectives for much of the book, allowing the reader insights into Allie’s thoughts and feelings as she reconnects with Noah, the country boy with whom she had an unforgettable, passionate, and deeply romantic summer fling back in 1932. Allie Nelson, the secondary protagonist and narrator of the novel, is a sensitive and romantic young woman who finds herself at a crossroads between passion and logic as she questions her choices and revisits her past love with Noah Calhoun in the weeks before her wedding to Lon Hammond, Jr. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |