Okay, I admit that the relationship is indeed poignant, and Duras does have a different flavor in taking this memory and writing a book about it. But the purity of the relationship is worth reconsidering; after all, the beginning of the protagonist’s relationship is based on the mutual benefits of money and beauty. Another thing is that it’s a big joke to the people they each end up marrying, and I found it more or less disrespectful to the partners that later comes into their lives. (And maybe that’s my own personal little emotional cleanliness fetish?) Regardless, the biggest obstacle in this relationship is the reality of race and social status. This is like a gap that can not be crossed, not just by physical and spiritual love can be overcome, which at the same time also accomplished the key factors of the poignancy of this relationship.

Asia and Europe were probably the two poles of the world for Duras’s childhood, and her traveling between these two poles became part of her early life. This kind of exchange not only strengthens the connection between the two, but also pulls apart the distance between the two. The narrator received a Westernized education that was matched to her whiteness. In accordance with her mother’s wishes, she was educated in the white schools of the colonies literature, and with her mother’s words, her way of thinking and behaving then inevitably became European. As a descendant of colonizers living in the land, the narrator never had any doubts about her identity and status, white people, even if they came from a broken white family like her, still had an invisible sense of superiority. The colonizer’s mentality subconsciously influenced her thoughts and consciousness, so from the very beginning she was no different from the other white people, so she inevitably became European in her thinking and behaviour. The complete hermeticity between the two worlds reveals a real isolation. Duras separates the two worlds with a mysterious, ghostly language. As an adult, Duras tells the story of colonization and domination in a way that seems to be unintentional, but is in fact a story of colonization and domination. It can be said that this “love” in the colony is a disaster from the very beginning, and even the two parties involved know very well their position and the situation of each other, and neither of them thinks to save themselves. Under the background of the colony, the disaster that happened to “I” and the associated people are just an accessory.

Question for Discussion: 

“Throughout our affair, for a year and a half, we’d talk like this, never about ourselves. From the first we knew we couldn’t possibly have any future in common, so we’d never speak of the future, we’d talk about day-to- day events, evenly, hitting the ball back and forth.” (49)

Let’s hypothesize! If the relationship did cross the barriers, where do you think the two would end up? Is it happy and fulfilling? Or do they go their separate ways? (In other words, do you think the relationship would really last?)