Departure (to the end): Pages 105-117

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Departure in the The Lover

The unfortunate thing about novels is, they always come to an end whether you like it or not.  As I was approaching the end of The Lover, I wasn't really looking forward to the last page because I was expecting to be disappointed by Duras' lack of clarity and intent in the novel (in my opinion). However, I actually sort of smiled at the ending because it gave me that little piece of closure that I was seeking for in The Lover. (I don't want to spoil it for anyone so I'll just leave the ending as it is.)

From the beginning of the book, I was intrigued by the narrator's close connection with the river and the the ocean. She seems to think that the river possesses this calm, serene power which ultimately gives her some kind of spiritual inner peace. However, once again the narrator offers a contradiction to the calm and the serene river by describing her unwanted departure from Indochina. What I found strange was how being on the voyage was her mother's "happiest days of her life" because the twenty four day voyage was temporary, but it indicates her mother's tendency to fall in love with fleeting moments.
"The voyage lasted twenty-four days ....For our mother those trips, together with our infancy, were always what she called, "the happiest days of her life." (108)
As someone who was not of the white upper class, they had the opportunity to experience fleeting luxury and the reality of wealthy upperclassmen.

"Departures. They were always the same. Always the first departures over the sea. People have always left the land in the same sorrow and despair.......People were used to those slow human speeds on both land and sea, to those delays, those waitings on the wind or fair weather, to those expectation of shipwreck, sun, and death."  (108-109)

I think I've noticed a pattern in Duras' novel of she always attempts to generalize happiness and despair but at the same time emphasizes how she is alienated and how others will never be able to comprehend to a state of mind. Through the description of departures, she's somehow romanticizing it just as how most of us would feel when we're departing from our loved ones. The phrase "shipwreck, sun, and death" struck me as the opposite of the dark nights but also reminiscent of the shipwreck and death she expresses when engaging in an intimate relationship with the Chinese man. No matter what situation the narrator speaks of, it is always linked back to death, just as how all human beings will inevitably meet death. Her experience of departure is unique because she is weeping for a Chinese man, a man inferior to her status and she knows she isn't supposed to feel all those generalized and romanticized emotions for someone lower than her, someone who is undeserving. (But we all know by now that she actually does love the Chinese man more than she actually thought she did)
"She'd wept without letting anyone see her tears, because he was Chinese and one oughtn't to weep for that kind of lover." (111)