The Notebook Summary for Eternal Lovers by Nocholas Sparks

So What is The Note Book Summary? and What does eternal love mean? For many, it means living life together and remaining together through thick and thin. It is pictured by two people walking down the beach holding hands early in life then ending life still side by side, hand in hand. This is the basic idea of loving someone for a lifetime, but there are ways to put a spin on it without losing that basic meaning.

For instance, what about the story behind Nicholas Sparks' book, The Notebook? This is a passionate story with a central theme of eternal love, yet the main characters spend the majority of their lives without one another. In fact, one of the characters spends more time physically with one person while her heart is held with someone entirely different miles away. She spends all that time with one person, yet the story is of her eternal love with someone else.

This shows that eternal love is a matter of the heart, not the physical body. A good The Notebook summary will show you how love can be everlasting without ever being consummated. It is consummated in the mind as both people cling to one another through life, even if they are not physically together. This is a different spin on eternal love, but it is a realistic spin that some people actually live out in life.

Life can be cruel and not everyone who falls in love will have the luxury of holding hands on the beach, rocking on the front porch together, or even bickering with one another through old age. Sometimes life takes a spin and lovers end up like the characters in the story of The Notebook.

This novel later turned movie is about a young girl from a wealthy family who falls in love with a boy her parents do not approve for her. He is from a poorer family and her parents decide he is not enough for their daughter. She ends up being forced to move away from the boy and the mother intercepts his letters, ensuring that she will think he has forgotten her and move on with her life.

She does in fact move on with her life. She goes to college, meets a soldier, and accepts his marriage proposal. Yet, fate has a way of twisting a tale and she ends up reading about the boy she loved so many years in the past in the newspaper. She visits him before getting married and they realize how much they have loved one another over the years.

That is the basic The Notebook summary, but it is not the complete tale. There are some twists and unexpected turns that make this story extremely powerful. To reveal anymore would be to spoil the movie, so this The Notebook summary will stop right there.

The grown up girl has to make a decision between the soldier her parents approve of and the grown up man she has been carrying in her heart since she was a young girl. What fate has in store for her is completely unfair, but in the end she is blessed with something many people never experience in a lifetime: eternal love. That is all about The Note Book Summary wrote by  Nicholas Sparks.

The Notebook Summary with Spoilers

The Notebook started out as a fascinating novel by Nicholas Sparks. It was originally released in 1998, but a more popular mass paperback version released in 2004. The movie was released on DVD in 2005, but it remains an incredibly popular movie to this day. Nicholas Sparks is one of the most respected modern writers because he has the ability to paint a realistic world with characters readers can't help but care about. That is exactly what he managed to do with The Notebook. This summary of The Notebook will contain some spoilers and will give away the main twist of the story. If you don't want to hear that, find The Notebook summary without spoilers.

The Notebook starts out with an introduction to Duke and an unnamed elderly woman. Both are residents in a nursing home who like to spend their time reading from a notebook. Duke has a clear memory, but the woman is obviously suffering from a mentally disabling disease that causes lapse of memory. She enjoys listening to the stories that Duke reads her from the notebook.

The main story comes in the form of the words Duke reads. As he reads to the elderly woman, the reader or movie watcher is taken through the story in the notebook as well. It is the story of a young girl from a rich family named Allie and a boy from the other side of the tracks named Noah. In a way, it is the stereotypical Romeo and Juliet story in that you have a rich girl and poor boy with great parental disapproval on the part of the rich girl's parents.

The central story unravels as Allie and Noah fall in love and come close to making love, but her family shows up and moves her away from Noah. She doesn't even get to tell him goodbye and goes away with the stabbing pains of love lost. She waits for him to write to her, not knowing that her mother is intercepting all of the letters and hiding them. Noah writes her a letter every day for a solid year, but she doesn't know this and eventually goes to college and starts the rest of her life without him.

That may sound like the end of the central story, but it is not. Allie gets engaged to another man, but reads about Noah in the local paper before she says "I do." He is fixing up the house where they almost made love years before. He is restoring it exactly the way she said she wanted it all those years earlier. She goes to visit him and they end up passionately making love.

Romeo and Juliet do not have a tragic ending in this version of the tale. Allie ends up returning to Duke and later her memory lapses. She writes her love story down in notebook and gives it to Noah, instructing him to read it to her when she can no longer remember him. They end up being the characters in the nursing home, reading from the notebook so she can come back to him! 

The Notebook Summary without Spoilers

You are searching for The Notebook Summary that will shed some light on the plot of this movie, but you don't necessarily want the entire movie to be spoiled before you get a chance to watch it. This summary of the book turned movie The Notebook is for you. There is nothing here to spoil the main twist of the movie, but there is enough to give a general idea of the main themes of the movie.

The Characters

There are four main characters to be introduced in The Notebook:

• Allie
• Noah
• Duke
• Unnamed elderly woman

Yes, one of the central characters is an elderly woman who is not given a clear name throughout the movie. Allie is a young girl from a wealthy family and Noah is a young boy from a family of more meager means. Duke is an elderly man in a nursing home, reading stories from a notebook to the unnamed elderly woman,

Want are these characters doing in a book and movie together? You won't learn all the biggest secrets in this The Notebook summary, but keep reading to get a general of how the book and movie is structured with these four main characters.

The Story Frame

The Notebook was written with a frame. This simply means there is a story within a story. You have a story that takes up the majority of the movie and then a related story that surrounds the movie at beginning and end. In this case, the frame of the story weaves into the central story with a few appearances toward the middle of the main story.

Two of the characters listed above appear in the frame of the story, while the other two appear in the central story. It is the frame of the story that holds the powerful punch of emotion at the end. Without the frame design, the story of The Notebook would not be nearly as gut wrenching and sentimental. Every character and both elements of story are needed to get that impact.

The Central Story

This is where the action of the story really takes place. This is where most of your attention focuses when you watch the movie and read the book. There is a lot of emotion in this romantic tale, but it is far from a sappy tale where everything goes right. The basic theme of the book and movie is eternal love, but there is a different spin on eternal love than most people would ever think about.

If your idea of loving someone forever is the old, wrinkled couple rocking on the front porch sipping tea, you should watch or read The Notebook. The book was written by Nicholas Sparks, a modern author famous for spinning tales that are impossible to put down once you get started. The Notebook definitely fits that definition. Whether watching the movie version or flipping the pages of the actual book, you will have a hard time turning away once the main characters get a hold of you in the note book summary.