Later that night, as Clarissa and Joe are falling asleep, Parry calls Joe to tell him that he loves him. He shares a look with Joe and becomes convinced that they are in love. Also at the balloon accident is a lonely, religious young man named Jed Parry. His shocking and senseless death deeply upsets Joe and Clarissa and they try to comfort each other and make "sense" of the event by telling it as a story. That man, John Logan, a doctor and family-man from Oxford, is carried up into the sky by the balloon until he eventually falls to his death. Joe and a few other men try to save a child trapped in a balloon, but the high winds force all the men except one to drop the ropes. He explains that he chooses his beginning because it is the point that makes the most "sense." Joe starts the story with Clarissa and Joe's reunion picnic being interrupted by a hot air balloon accident. Joe is the main narrator of the book and he often makes references to narrative choices of exclusion or inclusion of details. Although Joe approaches the world through rationality and Clarissa approaches it through emotion, they are happy together and have a stable, comfortable world. Joe is a science journalist in a "childless marriage of love" with Clarissa Rose, an English professor of Keats. Enduring Love is a postmodern novel that explores themes of narrative and knowledge through the relationships of the central character, Joe Rose.
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