- Joe Rose become obsessive
Jed Perry is believed to have an obsession with Joe Rose, which may be deemed as unrequited love. Jed suffers from ‘de Clérambault’s syndrome’, a delusional disorder that typically involves a person who wrongly believes that another person is in love with him or her. The latter person mentioned tends to be older and of higher social status. The de Clérambault’s syndrome is also known as Erotomania. What is striking about Erotomania is that the subject (Jed) sees patterns and signals from the love object (Joe) and creates an environment around him and his love object. Still, there are some reasons that may confirm that to some extent Joe also has an obsession with Jed.
To begin with, an accident occurs when Joe and Clarissa, his girlfriend, are enjoying a picnic after not having seen each other for six weeks, marking the starting point of the story. A hot air balloon falls from the sky, and Joe and others, people who are around, try to help a kid trapped in the balloon by keeping it on the ground. One of those men is John Logan. Owing to the force of the wind, the balloon starts to fly again and everyone except John Logan drop the rope. After John Logan’s death, and because of having witnessed such a difficult moment, Clarissa, Joe and Jed are haunted by guilt. Joe gets obsessed with Logan’s death since he tries to find an explanation to that man’s death. Joe’s obsession represents his eagerness to alleviate his guilt. He constantly thinks whether Logan is a hero or just silly.
Joe's viewpoint of the events is what readers are more acquainted with. He occasionally tends to introduce somebody else's standpoint so that the readers get the chance to choose among the different standpoints and therefore, adopt the one which they think is better for each situation. After Jed Perry’s first phone call, Joe gets worried about Perry becoming a potential threat. Joe thinks that Jed’s love fantasy may turn vengeful and Joe may end up murdered. As a consequence, he tells Clarissa about Jed’s phone call. At the beginning of the story Jed appears to be inoffensive; in fact, Clarissa says that Jed seems to be a symptom of Joe’s anxiety about work and John Logan’s death. Joe spends most of his time looking for answers to explain the senseless death of John Logan and Jed’s Parry condition, leaving Clarissa aside. According to Clarissa, Joe appears to have permitted Parry’s fantasies to grow and pushed Jed towards violent actions. Moreover, Clarissa admits not having trusted in Joe’s power of rationing and in his exhaustive research into Jed’s condition.
In Enduring Love the notions of love and religion are fundamental in order to comprehend Joe’s and Jed’s viewpoints. Parry is a religious man, who believes that there is some sort of reciprocity of feelings between him and Joe. Considering that Joe is a recognized scientific journalist and an atheist, Jed is convinced that not only will he bring love to Joe but also bring God’s love. According to Jed, love is spiritual, divine, and of course, unrequited. Nevertheless, Joe’s viewpoint of love is related to science, his “-religion-”; love is what he felt for Clarissa before the hot air balloon accident. Lastly, Joe accepts that his interest in Jed may be considered an obsession – but an ambiguous one. Joe appears to be concentrated on scientific narrative, trying to understand John Logan’s death. Actually, Joe attempts to understand Jed’s behaviour by the laws of science because he lost his trust in science the day that John Logan died.
Taking everything into account, Joe spends most of his time looking for answers to explain John Logan’s death and Jed’s condition. Leaving Clarissa aside, Joe becomes extremely obsessive. Joe carries out an exhaustive research into Jed’s behaviour, which seems to confirm that, up to a point, he has an obsession with Jed. During his detailed research, Joe holds on to his religion, narrative science attempting to understand both phenomena Jed’s Clérambault’s syndrome and John Logan’s irrational death. He seeks to discover the principal reasons of both phenomena because when the events occurred, science has failed to explain them to him; Joe wants to trust in science again and alleviate his guilt.
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