The Epistemology and Ethics of Intentionality in Ian McEwan’s Enduring Love

Abstract

This article investigates the disjunction between predictive knowledge and genuine understanding in Ian McEwan’s Enduring Love (1997), by bringing philosophical accounts of intentionality into dialogue with the novel’s narrative representation of mind-reading. Drawing on John Searle’s insistence on intrinsic intentionality and Daniel Dennett’s conception of the “intentional stance” as a predictive heuristic, it argues that the novel stages a recurrent misalignment between what intentional states are about and how they manifest in behaviour. Joe Rose’s increasingly forensic study of Jed Parry’s actions allows him to successfully anticipate Parry’s future behaviour by attributing to him a coherent set of beliefs and desires. However, this predictive success does not translate into genuine understanding or ethical responsiveness. Instead, this reliance on a rational, third-person framework of interpretation enables a procedural containment of Parry’s distress while simultaneously undermining Joe’s relational engagement with Clarissa. Through close textual analysis of the novel, the article demonstrates how McEwan’s narrative problematises the assumption that epistemic access to another’s mental life equates to interpersonal comprehension. Building on Stanley Cavell’s distinction between knowledge and acknowledgment, it ultimately contends that the novel exposes the ethical insufficiency of interpretive knowledge when it substitutes prediction for response, thereby foregrounding the limits of epistemological approaches to intentionality in social as well as narrative contexts.