Hot Issues:

• Marriage
• Relationship (lovers, family, wife/husband, friendship, companionship)
• Gender difference
• Taboos
• Impaired communication (Florence and her father, Florence and her mother, Florence and Edward, Florence and friends)

In On Chesil Beach the narrator's aim is to make the reader in the condition to think about marriage, living together, and about the problem of sharing life between male and female.

Edward and Florence know they are unable to tell each other their problem but they believe that it is connected with the social convention, so, instead of facing the situation, they have decided to hide it. The intelligent reader may consider their behavior not like an adult's one, even if they got married, but like a youth's one: inexperienced, unsure, afraid, embarrassment.

Right from considering the characters' family relationships, the intelligent reader may understand that they belong to different social classes: Florence's family is aristocrat, she lives in an intellectual background, her mother is a philosopher teacher and her father is a businessman. Since she was a child, she was moved away from her family ties and her father was used to violence her, so  she doesn't feel home like her own place, in which  she is restless. Neither with her friends she feels fine, she couldn't tell them her problems and neither with Edward. She feels good only with her music group, that is her sense of being.

On the other side Edward lives in a modest family, his father is the director of an elementary school and his mother is a brain damaged and he has got two sisters younger than him. Lionel (Edward's father) told him about his mother only when he was fourteen years old. At the beginning for Edward, the term was like an insult, but after a while he could begin to persuade himself that he had always known it. With his friends Edward had fun and at home was used to pretend with her mother.  

Both the two characters have many problems, but even if in Edward's family the problem was a disease, caused by an accident, in Florence's family her mother lives out of reality and her father let off himself to satisfied his desires with his daughter.  So, in my opinion, the aristocrats have more disturbs than the lower class.