Past Perfect Tense Doubt?

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Hi,

I would like to know, why we used Past perfect (i.e. He had never felt so lonely) in below sentence. All I knew about past perfect is, we should use while saying two past situations and first one should be in past perfect like e.g. "I had talked to him before you called me".

"No cards, no presents, and he would be spending the evening pretending not to exist. He gazed miserably into the hedge. He had never felt so lonely"

Shall we use just simple past tense like "He never felt so lonely"?

Thanks,

Balakrishna

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Hi,

I would like to know, why we the author used the past perfect (i.e. He had never felt so lonely) in below the sentence below. All I know about the past perfect is that we should use it while saying when we have two past situations, where the older one and first one should be in the past perfect, like e.g. "I had talked to him before you called me".

"No cards, no presents, and he would be spending the evening pretending not to exist. He gazed miserably into the hedge. He had never felt so lonely".

Shall Should we use just the simple past tense like "He never felt so lonely"?

Thanks,

Balakrishna

The past perfect is not only used when there are two past actions. It can be used as a backshift of the present perfect. In the above, imagine asking that person how he was feeling. The answer might be: "I have never felt so lonely". The present perfect connects the past with the time of speaking (in the above example, he is talking about his entire life - from the time he was born until that moment of speaking).

Now, because that is all in the past, we backshift the present perfect, and it becomes the past perfect.

"He had never felt so lonely."

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gray olive 661Shall we use just simple past tense like "He never felt so lonely"?

No. That ("He never felt so lonely.") would mean that past, present or future, his loneliness cannot be or have been of that intensity, which verges on nonsense. With "had", it means that in his past (from his point of view in our shared past), his loneliness had never equalled or exceeded the loneliness he was feeling at that moment.

Thank you so much for your explanation and correcting my mistakes.

gray olive 661two past situations
gray olive 661He gazed miserably into the hedge. He had never felt so lonely.

The first sentence is about the situation during a time in the past.
The second sentence is about the situation during all the time before that.

That's two past situations.

The difficulty may be that the second sentence has a negation, but you can phrase the idea without the negation if that helps:

He was lonelier than he had ever been before.

CJ

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Thank you so much. It really helped me understand the logic.

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