The Notebook

In October of 1946, 31-year-old Noah Calhoun watches the sunset from the porch of his North Carolina home. He has been working on his fence. He strums a guitar and thinks about how much he misses his father. His dog Clem listens to him play. Noah has several more months of house restoration work to do before he has to find a job again.

Noah is lonely but hasn’t dated since being home in New Bern after being away for fourteen years because “[t]here was something that kept a distance between him and any woman who started to get close” (10). He wonders if he’ll be alone forever. He goes inside after it is dark and reads Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman.

His best friend is Gus a 70-year-old black man who lives down the road. Gus comes over a couple of nights each week to drink and tell stories. Noah knows that Gus was in love once, and “[i]t had changed him forever. Perfect love did that to a person, and this had been perfect” (12).

Noah remembers a night in 1932, at the beginning of the Neuse River Festival. He saw his friends Fin and Sarah talking to a pretty girl and went over to meet her, and “[h]e knew before he’d taken his next breath that she was the one he could spend the rest of his life looking for but never find again” (13). Soon they are seeing each other every day. He teaches her to fish and canoe, and she teaches him dance. She leaves at the end of August, three weeks after they lose their virginities to each other.

When Noah mentions her to Gus, years later, Gus laughs and tells him that he knew Noah was running from something—Noah works too hard, and Gus always thought it was to distract himself from something. Now he knows that Noah is trying to forget her memory: “‘This girl you been tellin’ me about was your first love. And no matter what you do, she’ll stay with you forever’” (17). After reading for an hour, Noah writes in his diary and goes to sleep.

That same evening, 100 miles away, a woman ponders her decision: She has told her fiancé, Lon, that she needs to visit some antique shops near the coast for a couple of days. She doesn’t tell him that this is a lie and that her reasons for the trip have nothing to do with him.

She met Lon in 1942 and has known him for four years. He is an attorney, eight years older than she, and “[s]he saw in him exactly what she needed: someone with confidence about the future and a sense of humor that drove all her fears away” (19). Despite rebelling against the idea of marriage for most of her life, she falls in love with Lon and accepts his proposal.

She takes a bath and thinks about her mother’s disapproval: “She had never really accepted what had happened the summer they’d spent here and wouldn’t accept it now, no matter what reason she gave” (21). After her bath, she dresses and realizes she is nervous. She takes a folded-up piece of newspaper out of her pocketbook, looks at it, and says, “‘This is why […] this is what it’s all about” (23).

The next morning, Noah kayaks for an hour and then works on the fence until lunchtime. He watches fish jump in the pond and admires them. The fish always have the same instinct, just as, “[a]s far as he could tell, man had always been aggressive, always striving to dominate, trying to control the world and everything in it. The war in Europe and Japan proved that” (24).

He thinks about his childhood. His mother died when he was young, and he developed a severe stutter. By age five, he “wouldn’t speak at all” (25). His father began taking him to the lumberyard with him and teaching him woodworking. Noah begins speaking again, and his father helps him by encouraging him to read poetry books out loud. Noah will never stop loving poetry.

His work with his father has given him physical strength, which helps him during high school sports. In turn, his time on the teams makes him popular. He dates a few girls, but only Allie, the girl from the festival, makes an impression on him. The night after they meet, he talks to Fin about her. Fin “made two predictions: first, that they would fall in love, and second, that it wouldn’t work out” (26).

Fin is right. Allie has to make excuses when she wants to see Noah. He is from a poorer class, and her parents would not have approved of him. Allie tells Noah that it doesn’t matter and that they will always be together. But after she leaves—when the tobacco harvest that brought her family to town ends, she returns home with her parents to Winston-Salem—she does not respond to the letters he writes her. Noah leaves New Bern to try to forget about Allie and works in a New Jersey scrapyard for a man named Morris Goldman.

Three years after writing Allie a final letter, Noah goes to Winston-Salem to find her. He learns that her family has moved, and no one knows where they have gone, so “[t]hat trip was the first and last time he ever looked for her” (28).

He dates one woman more seriously than the others. Before their relationship ends, she says, “‘I wish I could give you what you’re looking for, but I don’t know what it is. There’s a part of you that you keep closed off from everyone, including me. It’s as if I’m not the one you’re really with. Your mind is on someone else’” (29).

Noah enlists in January of 1941 and enters the war. In boot camp, he receives a letter from Goldman, thanking him for his help and entitling him to a small percentage of the scrapyard if it ever sells. Noah fights for three years before the war ends. When he comes home, he learns that Goldman has died. A business attorney gives him a check for $70,000: his percentage of the scrapyard. He returns to New Bern, buys his house, and begins the restoration work. His father dies less than one month later.

Allie drives through New Bern and is surprised at how little it has changed. She sees an oak tree and remembers that she fell in love for the first time beneath it. Noah was two years older than she, and to her, “he always looked older than he really was” (37). He read poetry to her beneath the tree, and she thinks of his voice. She drives to Noah’s house and sees him on the porch. She steps out of the car and moves toward him, and he walks to her: “Allison Nelson, twenty-nine years old and engaged, searching for answers she needed to know, and Noah Calhoun, the dreamer, thirty-one, visited by the ghost that had come to dominate his life” (40). 

Allie feels drawn to Noah, which surprises her. She “felt as she hadn’t in years, as if all her dreams could still come true” (42). They embrace. When she looks at him, she notices that “there was a new edge to him” (43). She begins to cry and tells him that there is something she has to say and that she hasn’t come just to see him. He asks her to go on a walk with him, and they leave the house. As Noah looks at her, she reminds him of “a living poem” (47).

She tells him that she is engaged and will be married in three weeks. At the top of a hill, they look down at the oak tree. He says he bought the property the tree is on just so he could preserve it and look at it whenever he wants. She tells him that she has to come talk to him about the engagement in person. When he cautions her about not getting married if she isn’t committed, she says, “‘I’m making the right decision’” (52). He asks her if they can start over and just get to know each other again. He invites her to stay for dinner. He has caught some crabs and says they’re the best in town. He leaves her and goes to empty the crab traps.

She walks to the dock and looks at the boards until she finds a heart carved into the wood with the words “Noah loves Allie” (56) inside it. In the house, Noah puts away groceries while Allie tours his home. She can’t believe how it looks now, compared to how rundown it used to be when they were teenagers. She asks him why he worked so hard on the house. Noah does not tell her the reason: “Ghosts, he wanted to say, but didn’t” (59). He tells her that he hasn’t had many guests since his father died, and this makes her feel sad.

Noah watches her cut carrots as he cooks and wonders why she has come despite being engaged. He remembers a painting she made for him, which now hangs above his mantle: “When he looked at it, as he often did in the evenings, he could see desire in the colors and the lines, and if he focused carefully, he could imagine what she had been thinking with every stroke” (62).

He shows her how to grab the crabs in a way that prevents them from pinching and says, “‘New Bern’s small, but it does teach you how to do the things that matter’” (63). They sit on the porch while the crabs cook. She reminds him of a night when she sneaked over to see him. Her parents woke and were waiting for her when she got back. Her mother said, “’Sometimes our future is dictated by what we are, as opposed to what we want’” (65). Her parents liked Noah but didn’t think that he deserved Allie. Allie says, “‘It was a terrible thing for a girl to learn. That status is more important than feelings’” (66).

Noah tells Allie that he wrote to her for two years and asks why she never responded to his letters. She says she never got one and realizes her mother must have intercepted them. Then she says that she thinks that she and Noah might have made it together, if she had gotten the letters. He asks her to tell him about Lon. She says that despite his good qualities, “[t]here’s always going to be something missing in our relationship” (68). She says she still looks for the kind of love she felt with Noah that summer. Noah goes inside to get the crabs. Allie wonders what she is doing there and knows that she is not in love with the current Noah, but the teenage version of him. “There’s nothing normal about any of this,” she tells herself (70).

When Noah returns, he asks if Allie still paints. When she says no, he takes her inside and shows her the painting above the mantel. She says that her professor and Noah are the only ones who ever told her she had talent and that “‘[m]y parents didn’t think it was proper for someone like me to paint for a living’” (73). When Noah tells her that she is an artist and he knows that she will paint again, “the chasm began to close for Allie, the chasm she had erected in her life to separate the pain from the pleasure” (74).

Over dinner, they talk about the night they met. Noah tells her that Fin died in the war, killed by a torpedo. They talk about what each of them has been doing for the past fourteen years, and they never mention anyone they have dated. Allie can’t remember ever talking this way with Lon because “[l]ike her father, he wasn’t comfortable sharing his thoughts and feelings” (81). Now she realizes what she has been missing. After dinner, they go onto the porch again.

Noah looks at Allie and realizes, “quite simply, he had fallen in love again” (82). He is not in love with the memory of her but this current version of Allie. She asks him to talk to her like he did under the oak tree, and he recites poetry for her. Lon has never made her feel this way, which is one of the reasons she still hasn’t slept with him, although she always tells him that she wants to wait until they are married. She realizes that Lon is driven, which has made him a success, but he would consider a night of poems and starlight a waste of time.

Noah and Allie say goodbye at her car, and he asks if he’ll see her again. She says she will come back the next day. Noah agrees and promises to take her somewhere she has never seen. After she leaves, Noah goes back to his chair on the porch, and “[i]f anyone had seen him, they would have seen what looked like an old man, someone who’d aged a lifetime in just a couple of hours. Someone bent over in his rocker with his face in his hands and tears in his eyes” (90).