Am curious about something...does the viewer really know for a fact that the elderly Duke, played by Garner, is Noah?????? WHY would Noah now go by the name, "Duke?"
The way Duke's kids talk about her also leaves it open to question whether she is their mother. They say, "She doesn't know us," and that could mean not only that she simply doesn't recognize them, but that she literally does not know them. And the nurse did say, "His," when Allie asked her whose kids they were.
I smiled to myself at the scene where the two kindly nurses (who happened to be Black) were taking care of Allie in the nursing home, because when my elderly mother is having a psychotic episode, she angrily accuses us all of plotting to "put me into a Black nursing home." I think I've mentioned that here before, and that Mom is also quite a Tiger Woods fan...and that I once suggested to her that perhaps a "Black nursing home" would be acceptable if Tiger Woods owned it.
Personally, I think a far cooler ending for The Notebook would have been if Duke was not Noah or Lon, but a later love of Allie's life, who knew that she had always secretly continued to love Noah, and so he let her think that he was Noah so that he could have the experience of being the great love of her life. After all, she did tell Lon once that she knew she belonged with him. Yet, WHY would Lon later go by "Duke?"
