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Several of the set texts are structured around the relationship between love and time — how love is remembered, how memory shapes and distorts the past, and how loss transforms the meaning of love. This lesson examines retrospective narration, unreliable memory, and the complex interplay between past and present in the representation of love.
Many of the set texts are told retrospectively — the narrator looks back on events that have already happened, creating a tension between the experiencing self and the remembering self.
L.P. Hartley's novel opens with one of the most famous sentences in English fiction:
"The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there." (The Go-Between, Prologue)
The elderly Leo Colston narrates from old age, looking back at the summer of 1900 when, as a twelve-year-old boy, he served as a messenger between Marian Maudsley and Ted Burgess. The retrospective narration creates multiple layers of meaning:
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