Roland is an eleven year-old boy living at a boarding school in the United Kingdom, two thousand miles away from home, under the wing of his piano teacher, Miss Miriam Cornell.Īs Roland quickly grows up, he finds himself irrevocably attracted to Miriam, nine years his senior, and so begins an ill-fated love affair which leaves with him with more scars and blackened memories than anything else. The novel takes us to not long after the end of the Second World War, in the 1960s, a time when the casualties and full extent of the destruction are still fresh in people’s memories. Though it would seem we are technically free to do as we please, there also appear to be numerous external factors influencing our decisions and guiding our lives, as is the case for Roland Baines in Lessons by Ian McEwan. Whether or not human beings have true free will is a topic which has kept awake our greatest philosophers since time immemorial, and the truth is we still haven’t settled on a definitive answer. Ian McEwan Raises a Question of Free Will
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