The Golden Notebook: The Notebooks: 4 Summary & Analysis

With Anna’s newspaper clippings, the black notebook comes to an abrupt end; her dream jarringly undermines the reliability of all her memories of Africa, which might as well be fiction, to her as much as to the reader. The television film is not only a kind of fiction, but precisely the genre that threatened to completely distort the meaning of Anna’s novel Frontiers of War; and yet this fiction seems to hold the “real” truth in a way that Anna’s memories do not, just as Anna can recount her experiences more faithfully through the yellow notebook’s fiction than through the blue notebook’s bare facts.

Although the reader does not see Anna’s newspaper clippings, she likely underlines “freedom” in order to show how the word is used differently in different contexts, usually to reinforce the political ideology of whomever is writing (to the Soviets, capitalism is a form of slavery, while to the West, the Soviets trample on their citizens’ freedoms). Harry appears again, but it is unclear whether he is the same Harry as the one in the black notebook or the Party meeting where Anna meets Nelson (just as it is unclear whether this Jimmy is the Jimmy from the black notebook). Here, Harry is a selfless, working-class hero straight out of communist clichés.

Although Harry seems to keep his communism completely secret (much as Anna keeps her writings private), he has an absurd faith that the world will recognize and reward his efforts, which leads him to ironically rejoice when the ideology he believes in fails. He is deeply invested in the communist myth that his personality also represents.

Harry’s story is a cynical retelling of the parody story gummed into the second part of the red notebook: whereas that story’s protagonist was in awe to meet Stalin, Harry is devastated to realize that his genuine commitment to equality makes him more a threat to the Soviets than their savior. If he is the same Harry from the blue notebook’s Party meeting, he presumably chose his Party loyalties over his free thought when he returned to London; Anna ends the red notebook with the same sense of disappointment that started it.

The Shadow of the Third is cut short with no resolution; Anna seems to be searching for a different story to make sense of her imbalanced relationship with Michael—or perhaps another affair in which she repeats her mistakes, falling for gestures that she now recognizes as insincere.

Anna begins to theorize her love for men who do not love her back: she wants to create something out of them, to affect them in the ways they affect her; Annie falls for this ploy, throwing away security to save the man from himself (which, predictably, she fails to do). But this is not quite a foil for Anna’s relationship with Michael—she never sought to change him—and suggests that she is talking about someone else, which is entirely possible since notebooks covering roughly the same time period are always presented one after the other (black, red, yellow, then blue).

In these stories the woman begins merging with the man she loves, losing any sense of distinction between him and herself. She understands herself only through him—he can access a part of her that she cannot.

This is another story about men like Nelson and De Silva, who demand a loyalty they cannot offer in return and use their other affairs to shield themselves from vulnerability; they sever all connection between love, emotion, and sex.

This man is simultaneously unable to voice his need for human connection and afraid to actually form that connection; Anna finally inserts herself explicitly into her story, offering two alternatives that suggest decisive action—but not necessarily moral courage.

Men’s parasitic reliance on women’s domestic labor and emotional support here translates into the realm of art; while Anna imagines building a man up in order to also pursue her own art, in this story her protagonist does so only at her own expense.

People with opposite roles cannot recognize their shared beliefs—they can only reconcile their agreement with their old enemy by declaring that he must be possessed by some alien force.

As Anna moves closer toward insanity, she finds her notebooks beginning to meld—yet she insists on sustaining their proper separation in order to keep herself sane. This story must be a film because, as Anna has argued previously, film tells stories in real time rather than retrospect—and, indeed, Anna’s obsession over Michael continues to define her “sense of reality,” destroying her “sense of time” in the present as her mind remains saturated with the past.

Anna continues struggling to separate her life from her fiction—especially as these stories increasingly look like straightforward accounts of her own experience.

The man is proving his “independence” to his wife as much as to himself—he is establishing a pathway out of emotional intimacy.

While this man is free of any woman in particular, he is clearly dependent on women collectively for his emotional sustenance—this may be a reference to Richard, who continues to rely on Molly, Anna, and his mistresses even though he has moved on from all them. Unwilling to make himself vulnerable to any single woman, he takes a little from many, but never achieves the full emotional independence he seeks.

With the dissolution of the barrier between self and other, the fully private and the merely intimate, truth and falsity also collapse into one another—Anna is also directly challenging the reader’s probable assumption that her notebooks are the closest one can get to her true interior self.

These stories explore the potential and pitfalls of relationships between similar people: while these similarities prevent them from truly fulfilling one another’s emotional needs, they also offer a mirror through which people can overcome those needs by recognizing and accepting their insecurities in the other.

Men remain more interested in conquest than love; this conquest is so absolute in the latter story that it completely determines the woman’s identity, which becomes nothing more than a mirror of the man’s.

This last story is unique: it is the only one with a title, imagined from a male perspective, and is actually written rather than merely planned. The men seem unable to distinguish between play and conflict, love and violence, or pleasure and pain; this kind of masochistic male bonding undoubtedly affects men’s treatment of women, yet Buddy abandons his friends because of his sexual appetite, even if he clearly dehumanizes the woman but appears to respect (however perversely) the other men. In calling her work pastiche, Anna is parodying men’s writing; but it’s unclear whether her adoption of the male perspective stems from success or resignation.

The blue notebook begins to blend together in a continuous stream that jumps days at a time; its integrated form parallels Anna’s spiral into madness but also increases the gap between her experience and the reader.

Anna is frightened both by the possibility that Janet will end up broken like her, Molly, or Tommy, and by the increasing likelihood that Janet will grow up to be conventional and happy, entirely unlike them, with no enduring mark of their influence—which makes Anna both a successful and failed parent. Realizing that her life only has a semblance of order because of her obligations as a mother, Anna seems to already know that she will descend further into madness.

Molly is precisely one of the miserable ex-Communists she fears Anna might become, and Anna has also long since moved out of her flat and away from her supervision. But Molly still clearly plays a maternal or sisterly role for Anna. The women’s attitudes about Americans parallel their own personalities—aloof Anna thinks Americans are reserved, and boisterous Molly think they are gregarious. This also suggests that England and America are cultural mirrors for one another, just as Anna’s relationships are mirrors that allow her insight into herself.

What Anna gained from psychoanalysis seems to be the opposite of what Mother Sugar wanted to offer her: while analysis was ostensibly about finding satisfaction and wholeness by reducing one’s life to myths, in fact Anna learns to feel her pain again only by recognizing the limits of these myths and the self-deception that Mother Sugar’s optimism leads her into. She finds the courage to feel and to pursue the truth of suffering, even if she can never fully express or access that truth through language (which, like myth, relies on order and form, so can never represent the world’s disorder and formlessness).

Anna’s pride in her own moral courage contrasts with her delight at realizing that Janet will likely grow up unable to truly feel, too comfortable and sheltered to recognize the suffering that surrounds her. While Anna worries that this kind of disconnection makes genuine love impossible, she knows that most men are already incapable of it, and so feels that Janet would not be missing out on much.

Mr Green’s thinly veiled excuse suggests that he has little respect for Anna. Tommy increasingly resembles Anna and Molly, with the contrast between his beliefs and his own comfortable elite life—perhaps this reflects the fact that the Soviet version of Communism played a less significant role in his leftist politics.

Anna sees that Janet, like psychoanalysis, imposed a defined order on her life that allowed her to go through the motions of her days without questioning her true motives or desires. The “game” is about learning to comfortably hold contradictions together, rather than losing perspective by focusing too much on the miniscule or macroscopic (like the daily romantic problems and the horrible news from afar that both, at different points, lead Anna to a kind of moral paralysis).

Of all the book’s characters, Saul Green most of all resembles George Hounslow, the brutish but sincere roadsman from the Mashopi Hotel. Like George, Saul’s actions reveal truths his words fail to hide; this conflict gives him the tension of a “real man.” Anna has long spoken about her desire to be “named”—to be called into a definite role, or confined to a myth. Unlike with the other men who “name” her to claim her as their sexual object, the “names” Saul gives her seem accurate: he appears to understand her rather than try and distort her for his own purposes, even though he is sexually interested in her.

These numbered asterisks correspond to the stories from the most recent section of the yellow notebook. Those stories are revealed as fictional accounts of Anna’s relationship with Saul, but subdivided into its parts; the reader can attempt to predict the course of their relationship from these stories, but Anna also noted that these stories were failures, much like her attempt to describe her relationship with Michael through the relationship between Ella and Paul in the yellow notebook.

Like so many of the other men Anna sees, Saul is fractured by the contradiction between his incisive, welcoming, and understanding self and his clumsy, manipulative, and violent one. Even while he completely ignores Anna, he certainly also reminds her of herself: he worries about whether art can express the truth or is merely becoming a commodity, and he seems genuinely sick because of his internal divide, unlike all the men who repress it to keep up appearances. His sickness reminds Anna of her own.

Success in the “game” means holding opposites together, turning division into tenuous unity, which is why it promises to cure Anna’s depression—but her compulsive “game” playing also looks insanity.

Like she had through her sessions with Mother Sugar, Anna goes from an inability to feel anything to an overwhelming feeling of pain—but her ability to confront it instead of blocking it out seems like progress. This anxiety is probably connected to Saul: it is the “air of tension” that Anna thought “real men” might give her.

Whereas Saul is usually boorish, aloof, and hotheaded, on this morning he is vulnerable and frozen. Then he returns to the distastefully egotistical man Anna first met. He is clearly divided, both in this sense and in his fight to control his own body, but in repeating “I, I, I, I, I,” he forcefully insists on his own unified identity, ignoring Anna and trampling on her own ego when she is already progressively losing her sense of self.

Anna recognizes her love in advance—as in a tragic prophecy, her knowledge precedes her feelings, which she feels powerless to stop. She seems to be feeling the impulse she cited in the yellow notebook: the desire to create something out of a man’s unrealized potential.

Like his initial, overwrought excuse for why he could not view the apartment, this lie of Saul’s is thin, the result of compulsion rather than a deliberate need to hide his affairs—the “friend” that is really part of himself also points to the schism in his identity. His anxiety seems to surface when Anna forces him to confront his contradictions, like when she catches him here; but his divided self also begins to infiltrate her, as in the stories about neurosis that Anna planned in the yellow notebook.

Anna specifically points out that, despite Saul’s cavalier attitude toward women and sex, he talks about it as something that happens to him rather than something he does—this recalls Ella’s reflection on the difference between being a sexual object and “giving pleasure” in the yellow notebook. Saul at once wants to be “taken” and refuses to be vulnerable to the women he sleeps with. The irony of Saul’s politics is that he was ostracized for having the right beliefs too soon—of course, with her resignation about communism, Anna is not surprised.

Anna confirms that Saul is the kind of “real man” she has sought; since many of her entries are so short, the stories she planned in the yellow notebook can offer context that is lacking here (story five about the man showing the woman that her own heart is the one she hears beating).

Saul and Anna seem to have brought each other genuine happiness—something Anna has not reported feeling since her night with Paul in Africa, more than a decade before.

Anna continues to feel like multiple people in a single body—but instead of keeping them sequestered in different notebooks, she now begins to directly confront her divisions.

It appears that Saul wants Anna to act possessively so that he can scorn her; of course, she does feel deeply possessive of him, but she decides not to reveal her true feelings, at once effacing her authentic self and protecting them both from Saul’s violent desires. Although she has long felt divided, Anna starts to see an analogy between her and Saul’s senses of internal division. The joy-in-spite dream is clearly about Saul’s apparent pleasure in sleeping with another woman. But, whereas previous male characters’ insistence that sex does not matter to them in fact proved to Anna (and Ella) that she was insignificant to them, too, here Saul seems to “mean [no]thing” by sex precisely so that he can soothe his anxieties and return to his tender self for Anna.

Anna and Saul’s relationship is based on mutual breakdown as they dissolve into one another, which is why they are terrified of their love; this might also explain why Anna has the joy-in-spite dream about herself (which might really be Saul).

Anna and Saul realize that their anxieties are parallel—they are both afraid of being used and hurt and convinced that the other does not need them.

The American persecution of communists ironically follows the Stalinist playbook, forcing people to sacrifice their private beliefs in order to profess the correct dogma publicly. Like Marion, Saul also plays various roles in his political speech, even taking up the liberal ideology that led to his expulsion from the United States. Anna contrasts this kind of political role play, in which one’s beliefs depend on context and convenience, with real moral courage—which, of course, she lacks just like Saul. This moral courage requires balancing a realistic pessimism with a resolute commitment to action—it is the alternative to naïve idealism and hopeless resignation, the way out of Anna’s cycle of inspiration and disappointment.

Saul completely lacks a stable ego—he is unable to keep hold of his ideas or memories for more than a few minutes and repeats his thinly veiled talk about a “friend,” which Anna can easily see through.

Anna is frightened to realize that Saul might drag her down into utter insanity, completely destroying her sense of self; by locking herself in the room alone, she tries to secure her independence from him, but she is also sickened precisely when he leaves to see another woman (which signifies a break in his affections, too).

Saul again secures Anna’s affection and trust by conveniently returning to the best version of himself when he gets home. His insistence that Anna make him dinner represents his seemingly absolute power over her—it is patronizing and forces her into the same gender roles she has sought to escape by refusing marriage.

Anna attempts to understand Saul’s past by decoding his diaries—this is exactly what the reader is forced to do with Anna, and in both their cases, their private writings clearly do not fully capture their identities. Anna cannot determine whether the Saul who writes the diary is closer to or further from the Saul she knows, and she struggles to imagine how any writing could ever approximate experience. Through Saul’s letters to other women, Anna can recognize his impulsive flight from intimacy as a longstanding pattern; of course, she cannot see how he may have treated them in person, before abruptly scorning them.

Anna is as astonished at her own apparent foresight as she is at Saul’s indifference to Mavis’s well-being; he seems unable of appreciating the extent of his effect on women, and this confirms her suspicion that he flees from them when he is most needed.

While Saul almost never directly reveals his feelings to Anna, his journals express a seemingly coherent perspective on their relationship. Saul has difficulty reconciling his love for Anna and his sex with her—yet Anna is more hurt by his disinterest in sex with her than his relationships with other women.

The timing of Saul’s note suggests that he may have been in a particularly critical mindset, and that his entry might not be an accurate picture of his feelings toward Anna.

Ironically, just as Saul asked about a “friend” when he was really talking about himself, Anna’s doctor assumes that her complaints about a “friend” must be about herself; yet clearly she is ill, too, with their shared madness.

Saul and Anna continue losing all sense of who they are; yet they also fixate on their differences, with their search for national styles of sex suggesting an attempt to “name” away their differences through reference to broad archetypes.

As though to hold themselves together (and apart from one another), Anna and Saul draw a clear line between their values. Instead of fleeing confrontation, for the first time, Anna directly states what she needs from Saul (fidelity), acknowledging that she is much more of a wife than a mistress.

Anna says remarkably little about Janet’s new life—it is utterly conventional, their relationship no longer returns Anna to normalcy (instead, it seems to remind Anna about the normalcy she cannot have, but also does not quite want). Anna’s pain crosses the boundary from mental to physical, and she throws up in the bathroom as though trying to expel Saul’s influence from her body.

When Anna insists on drawing an emotional boundary with Saul, he recoils and cannot give up having his way. He acknowledges his insanity, but does not let Anna help him fully confront it. In talking about how they will remember their relationship, he both promises that their relationship will end and comments on the structure of literature, which Anna has remarked judges events retrospectively, from an outside perspective, even when those events are remembered. It is thus unsurprising that Saul’s recourse to a perspective outside his own is what finally turns him into the figure of joy-in-spite.

Anna continues realizing and utilizing her power to make Saul confront his demons by refusing to give into his sadistic side—she learns strength by realizing that it can heal them both. And so she appears to be gaining the upper hand in their relationship, especially by refusing to admit the hurt his infidelity causes her. This leads to a breakthrough: Saul finally admits his underlying misery. Contrary to the joy-in-spite nightmare and unlike with previous men, Saul takes joy in healing Anna and so needs to continue causing her pain; he also talks about the unimportance of sex to justify, rather than deny, his feelings for her.

Anna’s ability to “name” Saul distances her from her pain by reminding her of her emotional strength; again, love figures as the unbalanced, incestuous neurosis of a mother and son.

Saul quite literally takes on a different persona, having lost track of his Anna’s identities. Anna continues to induce crises of anxiety in Saul by naming and defining him—she seems “sane” to him because she has the power over his identity that he lacks. With the ability to name and injure now reciprocal, it becomes clear that Anna and Saul can mutually heal one another in a way they cannot heal themselves.

Anna again shows that she is more likely to record her dissatisfaction than her moments of happiness with Saul; like Anna with communism, she and Saul learn that their cycles of tranquility and conflict predictable, and this knowledge allows them to conceive an alternative to the cycle rather than remaining caught up in it.

Saul finally admits that he has grown dependent on Anna—she has become part of his conscience, able to influence his thinking, give him anxiety, and regulate his values in a way no woman ever has. His strange perception of time also reflects his mental breakdown, and recalls Anna’s declaration that her sense of ordered time and regimented obligations was keeping her sane before Janet left for boarding school. Yet Anna also sees this madness as a form of freedom  from the memory and history that continue to determine her sense of self.

More disturbing than Saul’s sexual violence toward Anna is her sense of freedom after it; she recognizes that he injures her out of his own emotional fragility that drives his violence. Saul’s attempt to consolidate his identity through “I, I, I” is much like psychoanalysis for Anna—both fail, but expose genuine feelings of tension and conflict that the characters must instead learn to embrace. Anna again reminds the reader that her notebooks cannot offer a full picture of her relationship with Saul, since there she finds nothing notable to write about their periods of normalcy.

Saul and Anna both feel imprisoned by their relationship—Anna by Saul’s cruelty, Saul by the need to answer for it and his unwanted emotional attachment to Anna. Of course, Saul is already seeing other women, which suggests that Anna offers him something unique—perhaps precisely the accountability he needs.

As their senses of self break down, Saul and Anna get ever closer to dissolving into one another and losing all sense of the boundary between them. This same sense of violent dissolution, which Anna wrote about extensively in the black notebook, continues to dominate the world and perhaps accounts for her obsessive newspaper-clipping collections. Her new version of “the game” depends on seeing this fundamental principle in herself and the world at the same time.

Words and language hide instability through the illusion that they directly refer to the world instead of merely approximating it, which is partially why Anna’s blue notebook grows increasingly ambiguous and contradictory as her relationship with Saul develops. In wandering around London, Saul tries to find himself outside his relationship with Anna but realizes that he cannot—his identity is pinned to hers.

Saul is on the brink of losing his battle for unity, but this is actually a good thing because he lets down his guard, allowing Anna to finally help piece him back together. The total dissolution of his identity creates the potential for salvation through love, transformation through the admission of failure. As Saul falls apart, Anna begins to look more sane than ever—if only for a few brief moments.

Realizing that she, too, has multiple personalities within her, Anna tries using them to cobble herself together—as with Saul, her fracturing starts looking like a way to save herself as well as a symptom of her illness. Her reminiscence brings her completely into chaos and out of reality for a while, but she emerges rejuvenated; Anna and Saul seem positioned to overcome their madness by embracing it, rather than resisting it. Anna’s new dream is ambiguous: could her happiness be the result of finally resigning herself to taking joy in spite, or does the positive version of the dream mean that the dwarf figure now represents something else?

Anna no longer lets Saul’s departure hurt her and starts experiencing the world from other, more distant viewpoints, integrating herself with events across the world as in her “game.” The shift to film is key: Anna has written multiple times that film is closer to actual human experience because it happens within the flow of time, whereas literature is detached from space and time (even when it focuses on specific events). Mathlong’s emotional detachment points to the paradox of political action: to an extent, people must block out empathy in order to get anything done.

Saul and Anna’s tumultuous arguments resume; he imagines that her notebooks must revolve around him, which is indeed true—he dominates the blue notebook to the exclusion of everything else, which so threatens him because he conveniently forgets his “crimes.” Like Ella’s fictional protagonist committing suicide in the yellow notebook, Anna decides abruptly to consolidate her notebooks—which no doubt represents a decision to consolidate her identity—but seems to have been planning it forever, unconsciously. Yet she and Saul draw a clear distinction between consolidation and becoming “one small thing”; Anna’s sort of consolidation, like her “game,” requires holding tensions and contradictions together rather than blocking out what is inconvenient. She gains a unified identity by expanding her horizons to include her divisions, rather than shrinking her horizons to exclude them.

The paradox of this entry is that while Anna did, indeed, end up writing in the blue notebook, it is entirely unclear what she originally hoped to write (but could not). Tommy’s political activities are still inconsistent with those in Free Women, indicating that the book’s narrative tension has also not been resolved. Tommy seems caught between inspiration and resignation—like Anna, he is unwilling to put his body on the line and only commits to revolution as an intellectual. He even becomes an expert on coalminers despite only working in the mines briefly, to avoid military service; while he might be advancing the revolutionary cause, he is still clearly not a sincere member of the working class.

For the first time, Anna’s madness is not just cognitive, but also perceptual—in bed, she comes to view herself as though she is a third-person observer. The others entering her body represent not only her sense of divided selves but also how her identity remains indebted to those who have influenced her in the past.

Anna sees that revolutions follow the same cycle of inspiration and pessimism as her own involvement in politics, but also starts to believe in the cycle despite its tendency to failure. In other words, perhaps the whole cycle of inspiration and depression, revolution and repression, means two steps forward and one step back.

The flying dream’s liberation allows Anna to enter other people rather than the other way around. She “names” both herself and the Chinese peasant woman, which destroys her freedom in flight but also quite literally grounds her in a fixed order. This is exactly how Saul and Anna “name” and heal each other by entering one another.

Anna’s “sense of duty” shows that she has moved from the paralyzing search for solutions to the capacity for action; its weariness suggests that it comes not from naivety or unrealistic optimism, but rather from moral courage. She and Saul can both recognize one another’s expectations and feelings, and ultimately the truth of the matter—whether Saul was actually with another woman—matters far less than his and Anna’s ability to fill their roles for each other.

Anna’s dream again shows how her and Saul’s need for one another to play particular roles—distinct from their actual personalities, and therefore fictional—has structured their relationship. It also points to fiction’s power to reconfigure their relationship and free them, so it is no coincidence that Anna admits her writer’s block for the only time ever. Her newfound belief in writing’s power to clarify and mask the truth sets her up to discover the golden notebook.

The titular golden notebook promises to let Anna finally give up on her four separate books and integrate herself into a single text. The golden notebook’s mysterious origin story implies that the notebook—and consequently Anna’s psychological progress—is a symbolic gift from Saul, the absent American from the stationery store. 

Anna finally takes the decisive step to combine her notebooks, but her new notebook is not wholly hers: Saul’s his writing opens the golden notebook. His curse is a direct challenge to the reader: try to distinguish him from Anna in what follows.