What expectations do you have of "The Go-Between" from reading the prologue? In what way does Hartley prepare us for what is about to happen?

Authors Avatar

Joanna Lowe        Page         Ms Pomeroy

‘The Go-Between’ - LP Hartley

What expectations do you have of “The Go-Between” from reading the prologue?

In what way does Hartley prepare us for what is about to happen?

“The Go-Between” is a story of memories, told by a man in his sixties, looking back on his boyhood to the particular summer of 1900 on a visit to an aristocratic family in Norfolk, where a chain of events that took place, due to his naïveté, provoked the downfall of the main character, Leo Colston. His two-week stay in a grand house, among upper-class strangers scarred him, and contributed to the type of life that he has grown accustomed to ever since, that of a companionless and removed life. The prologue of “The Go-Between” serves several purposes, being an introduction to the character, his life and how he came to remember that summer in which his life was changed forever.

The prologue opens with the cultured and educated bachelor in his sixties, Leo Colston, rummaging through a box of memories he once owned, taken from the year 1900, including the diary he kept for that year. The discovery of the diary and the other miscellaneous contents of the box; rusty magnets, photo negatives, dried sea urchins, etc. awaken the events that took place of the summer of 1900 which had been concealed and forgotten deep within his mind, and the contents of the diary as what he, Leo Colston, believes encouraged him to become the lonely and detached person he is today, in 1953, when the novel is set.

With the opening line of “The past is a foreign country, they do things differently there” a theme of the past and memory is instantly aroused. Even though the theme of the past is conjured up, there is a greater sense of distance, not only in the past but the way that the character himself is distanced by the choice of grammar, “they” instead of “we” and “do” instead of “did”. The opening line suggests Leo’s past to be of a foreign nature, meaning that his memories of his past have become foreign to him due to the fact that he buried them deep within his mind in order to forget the events that occurred the year of 1900. From the initiating line of “The past is a…differently there”, the reader is immediately made aware that this is a story of the past, and suggests an alienation of events which may have occurred in the past, with which the main character, Leo Colston, has consequently attempted to block from his mind.

After rifling through the contents of the recently discovered box, the older Leo discovers the diary, which contain the events that were to change him from then onwards. At first Leo doesn’t recognise the diary, “only the diary refused to disclose its identity” p5, and he primarily believes that “it was a present someone had brought (me) from abroad” p5, again emphasising the theme of things being foreign to him because they have been mentally blocked and so when he is confronted with these things later on in life they are seemingly alien. The older Leo is stumped as to why he cannot remember the diary because he believes that he must have treasured it at the time due to its expensive appearance, and so therefore he is unwilling to open it because it questioned his memory and he “disliked having it (his memory) prompted”, p5. After some time attempting to remember what the diary held and stood for, he ventures at opening the combination lock, and as soon as he hears the click of the diary opening, it was as though the key in the lock of his memory turned, and the chain of events recorded in the diary were uncovered.

Join now!

As soon as these events are recognised, the elder Leo realises that without the recorded events occurring, he would be a very different person leading a very different life, “not looking into the past but into the future…and not sitting alone”, p 6. This recognition causes the reader to conceive and comprehend the importance and the scarring effect that these events had upon the younger Leo, at the age of 12. The reader does not yet know of something that could be so powerful to change someone so much and in so many ways, but is forewarned of the ...

This is a preview of the whole essay