"Enduring Love," as written by Ian McEwan is the story of a disturbing incident, and how the central protagonists deal with the consequent events. The reader is told this story through its main protagonist, Joe. Through out the novel there is a lack of trust between the reader and Joe as he is an unreliable narrator, he chooses what to tell us and what he tells us is from his own subjective point of view. The story also tells of how the three central protagonists struggle to make sense of the events passed, each convinced that they are right and the other characters are at fault. In this essay, I will look how order out of chaos was managed from looking at the different functions of storytelling in the novel.
             Storytelling is defined in many different ways. The obvious is the telling of made up stories; fiction, a novel. It can also be a person's interpretation of events, news stories for example. These are seen as facts to many people but aren't they just another person's opinion? Storytelling can also be lies, for example Joe lies to Clarissa about Jed's phone call, and these are stories.
             The purpose of storytelling in the novel is to make order out of chaos. An important example of this is the way Joe and Clarissa go over and over the day's events, this is purely for self justification, it is to help themselves come to terms with whatever guilt they are feeling, and also to make some sort of order out of the events they are combining both their experiences to come up with one story. Also when Joe and Clarissa tell each other stories of their childhood, this is to comfort and reassure each other, and also to hide from the events of the day, it is a distraction. Also later on in the novel the purpose of storytelling is clarification. In the police station after the shooting in the restaurant the policeman is trying to clarify what actually happened, to get as near to the truth as possible, by gath...