The Lover by Marguerite Duras. This is an essay on the style of writing, the crucial moments, and important images of the story.

The Lover

In Marguerite Duras' novel, The Lover, there are many aspects or styles that this book differs from the other two books we have read thus far. The style of writing, the setting, crucial moments, and important images are a few of the aspects that set this book apart from most others.

The style of writing used in this book is different from that of the first two books. The Stranger was written in chapter form with two separate sections or parts. Snow Country was written in to two different parts. The big difference between these two and The Lover are that this book was not written with any chapters. It was written down as if she only wrote bits and pieces at a time. She must have written things down as they came to her or as she felt like putting them down. There is no order or sense of the story being told in a specific order.

Marguerite Duras

Thérèse Casgrain, third from the left; her daugh...

Helene Odenjung

It seems as though you could take one paragraph and move it in front of another or in back of a different one and the story would not miss a beat. This makes this novel unique in a way that most novels are not.

There are many different crucial moments or topics that continue to reappear throughout the novel. The first one that comes to mind is the topic of desire. Throughout the entire novel one of the major themes is this idea of desire. An example of this desire is evident on page 42 where the Chinese man and her are making love. "He smells pleasantly of English cigarettes, expensive perfume, honey, his skin has taken on the scent of silk, the fruity smell of silk tussore, the smell of gold, he's desirable. I tell him of...