You are viewing a free preview of this lesson.
Subscribe to unlock all 10 lessons in this course and every other course on LearningBro.
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:
The heat of the summer of 1900 becomes both a literal memory and a metaphor for the passion Leo witnessed but could not understand:
"The heat was like a punishment, and in my heart I longed for it to stop; but the mercury went on climbing." (The Go-Between, Chapter 8)
The heat connects the external landscape to the internal temperature of the affair — and the word "punishment" foreshadows the catastrophic consequences that will follow.
Du Maurier's novel is narrated retrospectively by the unnamed second Mrs de Winter, who looks back on her time at Manderley from an unnamed continental hotel:
"Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again." (Rebecca, Chapter 1)
The retrospective narration establishes from the first sentence that Manderley is lost — the reader knows before the story begins that the house and the life it contained no longer exist. This knowledge transforms every scene at Manderley into an act of memory, shadowed by the knowledge of loss.
The narrator's relationship to memory is characterised by nostalgia — a longing for the past that is simultaneously a longing for the place (Manderley) and the emotional state (love, belonging, identity) it represented:
"We can never go back again, that much is certain. The past is still too close to us. The things we have tried to forget and put behind us would stir again." (Rebecca, Chapter 1)
The tension between remembering and forgetting — the impossibility of either fully recovering or fully escaping the past — is the novel's emotional engine.
AO3 — Context: Du Maurier wrote Rebecca (1938) while living abroad in Egypt, separated from her beloved Cornwall. The novel's intense evocation of the English countryside — Manderley's rhododendrons, the sea, the Happy Valley — reflects Du Maurier's own nostalgia for a lost landscape. The personal context does not explain the novel's meaning, but it illuminates the intensity of its attachment to place.
McEwan's novel is the most radical exploration of memory and narration among the set texts. The novel appears to tell the story of Robbie Turner and Cecilia Tallis — their love, its destruction by Briony's false accusation, and their eventual reunion. But the final section reveals that the narrator is Briony herself, now seventy-seven years old, and that the "happy ending" was her invention:
"The problem these fifty-nine years has been this: how can a novelist achieve atonement when, with her absolute power of deciding outcomes, she is also God?" (Atonement, Part Three: London, 1999)
The revelation transforms the entire novel. Every scene of love between Robbie and Cecilia has been filtered through Briony's guilty imagination — the reunion that the reader desired was fiction, and the reality was separation and death.
Subscribe to continue reading
Get full access to this lesson and all 10 lessons in this course.