The Lover

Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1984

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Summary

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Sections 1-3

Sections 4-6

Character Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

Tools

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Discussion Questions

Symbols & Motifs

The Narrator's Hat

The narrator’s favorite image of herself is on the ferry in Saigon moments before she meets the lover. She wears a man’s hat and secondhand outfit she regards as sensual and original. The hat symbolizes the interconnectedness of exterior and interior worlds. The narrator is poor and yearns for independence. She knows that a man must provide her with wealth and the ability to distance herself from dependence on her family. To wear a man’s hat to attract a man presents a nested sexuality; the narrator is physically beneath this representation of masculinity. The hat was “another markdown, another final reduction” (12); it combines themes of sexuality and money into a single item, which the narrator uses to alter her external world.

Authorship

From an early age, the narrator expresses her desire to work as an author. She has a free associative style and wants to write about aspects of her childhood she has yet to describe in words: “Sometimes I realize that if writing isn’t, all things, all contraries confounded, a quest for vanity and void, it’s nothing” (8). The narrator focuses on describing her own life and how she has used her appearance to become the woman she wants to be at the time of writing: that is, a wealthy woman living comfortably in Paris. In the style she writes, the narrator’s interior world becomes external; it is presented to an audience and exposed for all his contradictory and painful elements.

The Lover’s Bedroom Windows

Immediately following their first sexual experience, the narrator and the lover lie in bed. She notices the foreign, slatted windows that line the lover’s bedroom and their incredible thinness, as if the people passing on the street are not fully apart from them: “there’s nothing solid separating us from other people” (41). These windows embody the novel’s themes of exterior/interior worlds as well as societal expectations.

The narrator is physically separated from the city, but the porousness of the windows allows noise and shadow into the lover’s bedroom. This confuses the narrator’s boundaries between an external and internal world. In his bedroom, she and the lover become combined, a sensation that she yearns for. The lack of separation between their affair and the judgment of the city beyond the windows heightens the dangerous nature of their relationship, especially because she is a white woman unwanted in the Chinese section of the city.