McEwan’s use of the balloon as a symbol begins a complex network of ambiguity. Clegg freely admits that, ‘Seeing her always made me feel like I was catching a rarity,’ again juxtaposing Miranda and the butterflies. The ‘observations diary’ of Clegg also parallels the capture of butterflies and beautiful women as being of equal importance, dehumanizing Miranda and making his obsession easier to justify. Similarly, the lexicon used by Fowles to describe butterfly catching, for example Clegg’s ‘entomological observations diary’ is akin to someone trying to emulate a scientific tone and this creates a similarly distinct narrative voice for Clegg and his related obsession. The exaggerated size suggests the author is going beyond the balloon as a physical object but more like a force of nature or scientific abstraction for obsession which seems to drag the men inexorably towards it. Rose describes this as ‘the colossus at the centre of the field that drew us in’. This scientific authorial voice characterises the novel’s narrator and suggests the grand implications of the balloon on the narrative. The author imbues it with a transcendental quality by relating it to the formation of the universe ‘the generation of multiplicity and variety of matter in the universe’ and cosmology. The balloon of Enduring Love is also a striking visual metaphor which foreshadows uncontrollable obsession in the book.
The visual aspect of the butterfly and the concept of pinning it down to spread its wings and then photograph it from every angle for “science” definitely finds shocking visual parallels in Clegg’s obsessive behaviour, ‘I took her till I had no more bulbs left.’ However, it still acts as the metaphor and pre-figurative device through which the reader can infer Miranda’s future including her capture and imprisonment. In The Collector, this symbol is more of a recurrent motif and not something the reader can trace as the beginning of obsession.
In Enduring Love, the symbol of balloon is an inanimate object whereas The Collector’s main symbol is the butterfly. This idea is also analogous to all obsessive actions which unfold from this ‘pinprick on the time map’ such as Joe and Jed’s mutual obsession and Jean Logan’s obsession with her husband’s death. This is shown by John Logan’s laudable but obsessive refusal to let go of the rope which drags him further away from safe ground and the sanity that it represents. In Enduring Love, the opening events and metaphor of the balloon act as a foreshadowing device for obsession. Both John Fowles in The Collector and Ian McEwan in Enduring Love use complex symbols and metaphors to expose the theme of obsession.
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