This chapter-by-chapter summary contains plot spoilers!

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Navigate the Summary Parts: Part 1: Molly & Anna talk Part 2:  Rhodesia Part 3: Recruiting voters Part 4: Tommy's accident Part 5: The producers Part 6: Comrade Ted's excellent adventure Part 7:  Anna's detailed day Part 8:  Tommy recovers Part 9:  Pigeon pie Part 10: Psychoanalysis Part 11: Nightmare Part 12:  A toxic party Part 13: Anna talks to Tommy Part 14: Black, Red, and Yellow notebooks end. Part 15:  Saul Green arrives Part 16: Anna and Saul have sex Part 17:  Anna and Saul argue Part 18: Anna reads Saul's diary Part 19: Anna and Saul go nuts Part 20:  Blue Notebook ends. Part 21: the Golden Notebook Part 22: conclusion

The Golden Notebook by Doris Lessing: Pages 572 – 580

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Blue Notebook: (Brought to you by kat impatientreader.com) Now Anna sees that the walls and floor are heaving and bulging again. She lies down on the bed and has an out-of-body experience.  She can see her own body lying on the bed as people from her past come in the door and try to climb into her body. With interest, she recognizes Mary Rose, George, and Mrs. Boothby among others from her Rhodesian days.  But when Paul, who's been dead awhile, tries to climb into her body, Anna rushes back in a panic to reclaim it.

Anna remembers Mashopi and tries to get her fingers to close around a pen so that she can write in the Blue Notebook. But then she turns into a soldier holding a gun. She realizes that she's an Algerian soldier fighting the French.

As Anna, she no longer believes in any cause enough to torture and kill in its name. But she keeps submerging into the consciousness of this Algerian and experiencing total belief.  She thinks that her personality may disintegrate, and this fear jolts her out of the dream and into an exhilarating dream of flying. She has another dream about a Chinese peasant woman. She wants to enter this woman's body and be her, but again her fear prevents her. She wakes up, feeling tired of being Anna.

Saul returns and tries to pick a fight.  He takes her hand and admires it, obviously comparing it in his mind to another woman's hand.  Anna and Saul have some more really bad sex.  In the middle of it, he loses touch with reality again and thinks she's another woman.

He compliments her on various features of her body that are not as he describes, and then accept an offer to have his baby that she never extended. She reminds him that she's Anna, and then goes to the bathroom to throw up (from anxiety).  Then she returns to get into bed with him and sleep.  She dreams that he and she act out every conceivable male-female role in the history of humanity.

In the morning, Anna wakes and Saul is cold and inert. She warms him with her body, and sits at her table to write.  He wakes and asks her why she doesn't just put the journals aside and write another novel.  For the first time, she admits that she has writer's block.  She goes out to shop for food, realizing that Saul will be leaving soon and she will miss the pleasure of looking after a man.

On impulse, Anna goes into a stationery shop and buys a new notebook with a dull gold cover.  The shopkeeper tells her that it was a special-order for an American customer who paid a deposit, and then never returned.  (Saul?  Who knows?) Anna buys the new golden notebook and takes it home.  Saul sees it and turns into his little boy persona, demanding that she give it to him.  Anna almost does, finding it hard to deny him and claim it for herself. Afterwards, she wishes that she had just given it to him.

At the end of the day, she admires her new golden notebook.  Then she sees that Saul penciled a childish verse on the cover:  "Whoever he be who looks in this / He shall be cursed, / That is my wish. / Saul Green, his book (!!!)."  This makes Anna laugh, and she considers giving the golden notebook to Saul after all.  But then she decides to keep it, pack away the four notebooks, and start a new notebook with all of herself in that one book. Here the Blue Notebook finally, finally, FINALLY ends.
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