31 pages • 1 hour read
Nicholas SparksThe Notebook
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1996A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
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Noah Calhoun
Noah Calhoun is a teenager in New Bern, North Carolina, when he meets Allie Nelson. He falls in love with her while she is in town with her family for the tobacco harvest one summer. When Allie leaves, Noah writes to her every day, but she never responds. He leaves New Bern for fourteen years to try to forget about her. When America enters World War II, Noah enlists and spends three years fighting in Europe. Despite the horrors he sees, Noah remains an optimist and a gentle person. After returning from the war, he buys a house and begins the project of restoring it.
Despite his small-town upbringing, Noah loves poetry, art, and culture. He never compromises the things that are important to him. He dates women after Allie but never finds himself interested in anything long-term with any of them. He realizes that he works hard as a distraction. He is constantly in motion, trying to keep Allie out of his thoughts. When she re-enters his life, he falls in love with her again on the second day they spend together.
Decades later, when Allie is diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease, Noah’s devotion to her reaches a new depth. He spends every day reading their story to her, despite the fact that she rarely remembers who he is. When she does, it is always short-lived. A nurse at the nursing home where Noah and Allie live tells Noah that she has never seen anyone as devoted as he is. Despite Noah’s frequent claims that he is a simple, common man, people in the novel react to him as if he is special and unique. By the book’s end, he has contracted cancer. He visits Allie in the night at the Creekside Assisted Living Facility where they both live, and he and Allie appear to die together after she recognizes him, calls him by name, and kisses him.
Allie Nelson
When Allie meets Noah, she is a teenager from a wealthy family who made its fortune in tobacco. She’s only in New Bern, where Noah lives, for the summer tobacco harvest. She falls in love with Noah and promises him that they will always be together, even though she has to leave at the end of the summer. After leaving New Bern, she is sad when she never gets a letter from Noah. She does not know that he is writing to her and that her mother is hiding the letters. Allie eventually moves on. Fourteen years later, she is engaged to Lon Hammond, a successful attorney.
Allie sees an article about Noah in the newspaper three weeks before her wedding. She goes to New Bern to tell him that she is engaged, although she does not fully understand her reasons for doing so. Over the course of the novel, she realizes that she needs to see him one more time because she has never stopped thinking about him. The passion she feels for Noah is absent in her relationship with Lon. After two days with Noah, she is in love with him again and has begun to work on her painting—something she gave up in the absence of Noah’s encouragement.
Allie breaks off her engagement to Lon and marries Noah. She ignores the strictures of class and proper society and chooses to be with the man who makes her happy. They are together for nearly fifty years, the last four of which are spent with Allie’s memories destroyed by Alzheimer’s disease. As the novel ends, she has remembered who Noah is, if only for a moment.
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By Nicholas Sparks
