The Persistence of Desire is based on the idea that there is always an unfinished business between former lovers, in a sense of absence of closure. Though some people are able to deal with such feelings in a positive way and move on, others experience moments of doubt, ecstasy, pain, curiosity, longing, etc, when they face the a former lover from the past. Thus, there is complexity rekindled emotions.
Clyde and Janet, the characters of this short story, experience an upsurge of these emotions when they run into each other at an ENT physician’s clinic. How they react to each other’s presence shows not only their residual feelings but their maturity and growth, or the lack of it. It seems that Janet has moved on, while Clyde still holds feelings for Janet, even though he was the one who jilted her. Maybe, he is acting the way he is out of guilt. Nevertheless, it is evident that he must have been very fond of Janet in the past and their break-up would not have been an easy decision for him to make.
The readers learn that he has a wife and children; however, his views about happiness are ambivalent. When Janet asks him that surely he must be happy, he tells her that happiness is not everything. It seems that he is in search of something more and is not contented with or thankful for what he has. Clyde is shown to be a sentimentalist, a man who is easily stirred to emotions; a sort of person who likes to hold on to the past. He seems to be a frequent visitor to the clinic due to his health problems. For instance, his eye problem owes to the fact that he doesn’t wear his glasses as often as he should and prefers a fashionable frame instead of a practical one for the sake of vanity.
Clyde doesn’t seem to be conscious of the passage of time, or the fact that he is no longer young and responsible for the well-being of his family, or maybe he likes living in the past. He becomes conscious of this aspect of age versus passage of time perhaps when he is unable to read the note Janet pressed in his palm before leaving.
Whatever is the reason and whatever is written in the note, Updike seems to give more importance to the feelings of the characters and not the consequences. He skillfully narrates how Clyde emerges from the clinic after the meeting in a mood that is joyous and less wistful and how he moves ahead energetically on the street he knew so well. Thus, “meeting Janet also becomes for Clyde an orienting moment in the flux of life” (Detweiler 48).
The story is an affirmation that the faulty of memory is a place for all of these: comfort, pain, pleasure, as well as peril – for it can renew emotions that are at best left buried in the past; it can also make one conscious about the passage of time; it can also make one feel happy to be alive and to have experienced.
Work Cited
- Detweiler, Robert. John Updike: Twayne’s United States authors series. Boston: Twayne Publishers,1984.
