Doors Symbol Analysis

In Enduring Love, doors symbolize obsession. When Joe first describes John Logan’s abandoned car, he states cryptically that its “door, or doors,” were “wide open,” a detail that makes Jean Logan believe that a second person—a woman—must have been in the car with her husband. For Jean Logan (and, to an extent, for Joe and Clarissa, who doggedly try, throughout the book, to remember just what they saw), the car’s doors are an entry point into an entire alternative narrative: if two doors were open, Jean’s husband must have been having an affair, and Jean’s married life must have been based on a lie. Elsewhere, doors contribute to obsession for other characters. When Joe glimpses Jed Parry in the reading room of the London Library, he becomes momentarily enthralled by the “diminishing pendulum movement” of the swinging doors that lead into a stairwell. (He “could not stop looking” at it.) When Jed Parry envisions, in a letter, his future life with Joe, he imagines Joe coming “right up to the front door,” where “hardly anyone” goes. In both of these cases, a door signifies the fulfilment of a certain kind of obsessive prophecy: Joe’s belief, even early in the novel, that he is being stalked by Parry, and Parry’s belief, against all reason, that Joe will one day come to live with him in his house.