Concept of Love in Paradise of the Blind As one explores the novel, Paradise of the Blind, the author Duong Thu Huong shows occurrence of the concept of love throughout her novel by manipulating each character to show this through both their actions and emotions. Although the characters are manipulated by the author to show love, it is the interactions between them that show us the deeper analytical meaning behind their perspectives of love. Thus, the concept of love is prevalent throughout Paradise of the Blind as shown through the progression and motives of main and side characters. First, we will explore through the adventure of the trail of love between Hang and Que as we see how it slowly disintegrates throughout the progression of …show more content…
Que begins to take care of him but starts to forget and malnourish Hang until finally Aunt Tam steps in to intervene. After being scolded by Aunt Tam, “My mother lifted her head off the table and looked at me. Her eyes were strange. Puffy and hateful. … From that day, things between us degenerated slowly. I didn’t know what to do, so I tried everything. … First, there was her coldness tinged with irony” (Huong, 188). Through the progression of events, Aunt Tam continuously provides for Hang while Que was not able to provide for her because of Uncle Chinh’s illness. Through this altercation, we see that as Aunt Tam provides for Hang materialistically the relationship and love between Hang and Que starts to disintegrate. Starting from motherly love and the progression to materialistic love and now finally the descent of love between the two. Que feels that Hang looks up to Aunt Tam more than she does to her because she demonstrates a feeling as if Aunt Tam is able to provide better for Hang than Que herself can provide. Next, when Hang meets Aunt Tam for the first time within her life, Hang instinctually feels a sense of the love that comes from that of a father through her Aunt because of their close resemblance. Her initial emotional response was “This voraciousness put me ill at ease. I knew she was my blood, the link to my father. This was the love that had been buried, impossible to imagine” (Huong, 72). This type of love only remained for
Love exists as an emotion that continues to be challenging to comprehend, but once one feels it, it seems problematic to let it go. Kao Kalia Yang wrote the memoir The Latehomecomer, which tells of the toils the Hmong people faced in their excursion from Laos to the United States. Yang uses the story of her parents to convey the sufferings of the Hmong people and their journey. Her parents make a fitting example of a typical Hmong family fighting to survive and find love in a time of war. Although Kao Kalia’s parents met in unfortunate circumstances and had no home to live in, love kept them and their family together, even when times seemed their darkest.
Throughout the novel Invisible Man, Ralph Ellison works with many different images of blindness and impaired vision and how it relates to perception. These images prove to be fascinating pieces of symbolism that enhance the themes of impression and vision within the novel. From the beginning of the novel when the narrator is blindfolded during the battle royal to the end where Brother Jack's false eye pops out, images of sight and blindness add to the meaning of many scenes and characters. In many of these situations the characters inability to see outwardly often directly parallels their inability to perceive inwardly what is going on in the world around them. Characters like Homer A. Barbee and Brother Jack believe they are all knowing
In the short story “Two Kinds”, Amy Tan uses the narrator’s point of view to share a mother's attempt to control her daughter's dreams and ambitions. Tan`s short story is an example of how differing personalities cause struggles between a parent and child. Children often fall victim to a parent trying too hard or expectations being too high, and in the case of "Two Kinds," we see Jing Mei’s mother trying to live her life through that of Jing Mei. The outcome of her mother’s actions soon leads the narrator into feeling tension within herself, and between herself and her mother.
Blindness is not limited to physical manifestation. In Raymond Carver’s “Cathedral,” the figurative blindness is immediately apparent through the narrator and his shallowness, irrational jealousy, and egotistical personality. His dismissive behavior and ignorance towards the feelings of Robert, his wife’s blind friend, speak negatively of his character and reveals his insecurities. While the narrator’s emotional blindness and Robert’s physical blindness initially inhibits their bond, it eventually leads the narrator to an epiphany and the beginning of a character transformation. The different forms of blindness allow the characters to bond and grow over the course of the story.
“Cathedral” by Raymond Carver is a story that shows the sense of sight in relation to vision, but it shows that the sense of sight requires a much deeper engagement. The narrator, who Robert calls “Bub,” is astonishingly shortsighted or “blind” while the blind man is insightful and perceptive. Bub is not blind, but Robert is. Therefore, he assumes that he is superior to Robert. His assumption correlates with his idea that Robert is unable to make a female happy, nor is he able to have a normal life. Bub is convinced his ability to see is everything. So, he fails to look deeper than the surface and is why he doesn’t know his wife adequately. However, Robert sees much deeper than the narrator, although he cannot look at the surface. Robert’s ability to look deeper helps him understand through his listing and sense of touch. Throughout Robert’s visit, the narrator reveals he is closed minded and exposes how he views life in general. Bub is clobbered and it brings him to the epiphany that his views about Robert are actually a mirror image of how he views his life. His epiphany is shown through the author's use of appearance vs reality, irony, and vernacular dialogue; which shows Bub’s preconceived notations, the connection formed between Bub and Robert, and how out of obliviousness Bub gained insight.
The main reason for the huge crack in the mother-daughter relationship is due to the joint culture that they share and their conflicting opinions on their joint cultures (Parini 294). Communication problems with their mothers, in Tan’s writings, are due to the daughters of Chinese mothers wanting to be more American than Chinese (Tan The Opposite of Fate…. 22). Mothers who have immigrated to America face language barriers and feel the pressure of their new culture (Wiener 22). To a Chinese American daughter, not only does the Chinese mother humiliate the daughter, but traditions that tie back to their past are also humiliating to them (Parini 292). After the death of her father, Tan’s relationship with her mother decreased and caused her to become more rebellious to her mother’s good intentions (Angel 26-27).
Your analysis of Paradise of the blind reminds me of the literature of the great Gatsby that commonly reveal actions and brings out logic related to cause and effect, characters, and critical analysis of the story. Reading literature like Paradise of the blind and the great Gatsby is important to focus on the community level, to develop the significance of wealth, social class, as a reflection of the standpoint to understand the life of the characters. In Paradise of the blind, I see suffering of women under chaos beliefs. Unfortunately, the biases against women in different countries around the world still relevant today. In some places like those in the Middle East, males are able to go to school and learn how to read and write, but females
Planet of the Blind is brilliantly written by Stephen Kuusisto; he delves into his life story and gives readers exceptionally realistic descriptions of his experiences. Beginning the memoir, it is clear that Kuusisto is undergoing an obvious struggle between himself and his blindness. Born with retinopathy of prematurity, Kuusisto’s parents do their best to avoid his impairment. Due to this, Kuusisto describes himself as developing a sixth sense of giving off the perception that he could see significantly better than what he actually could. Throughout the memoir, Kuusisto chronologically tells of significant events during his childhood, teenage years, and adulthood and how he came to accept his disability and be confident in himself. During the course of these significant events, Kuusisto uses poetry to convey his emotions while also using the rhetoric of emancipation.
When you ask people what is the most important emotion exist in the world. Most people will certainly answer love is the significant thing which cannot be instead forever. This story talked about the love between main characters, including Rio, Aunt T, Uncle Jeff, Daddy and Stephen. It could be called multiple angle love. Uncle Jeff was a gay who loved Daddy, but Daddy had boyfriend rather than Uncle Jeff. Later, Uncle Jeff met Stephen, who was a homeless, invited him to home and bought furniture to this guy. It was amazing to say that they have not ever met before. However, Uncle Jeff took care of Stephen as a family member and friend. In fact, everybody nodded that Uncle Jeff was an optimistic person, who was enthusiastic and friendly to help others. After Jio realized the background of dead Uncle Jeff, Jio changed mind and agreed “Day Ah Dallas Mare Toes” was a memorable day, which deserved to be remembered.
In the beginning stages of his life Tayo lives with his mother who spends her time getting drunk and sleeping with various men. His mom did not care for his physical or mental health and eventually sends Tayo to live with his “Auntie.” Although Auntie takes care of Tayo physically she does not make an effort to provide a nurturing environment for him emotionally. Auntie fed Tayo and gave him a place to sleep, however, she also made it clear to him that he was excluded from the family, always keeping him close enough to watch but not including him. Silko proved Tayo’s alienation in this depiction of Auntie and Tayo’s relationship, “She wanted him close enough to feel excluded, to be aware of the distance between them.” Auntie was not true to herself or her roots. She was constantly torn between maintaining a pure image and staying true to her Indian roots. She was a devout Christian and looked down on Tayo for not being full Native American. Auntie and Tayo’s mom themselves were not stable and therefore they were unable to provide stability for Tayo. His mom left the reservation but instead of making a life for herself she ended up spending all her money on alcohol and sleeping with lots of men. Tayo did not know his dad but his dad was a white man, because of this Auntie looked down on
Lindo was arranged to marry Tyan-yu. While the marriage was short-lived, Tyan-yu constantly lied to Lindo, and Tyan-yu’s mother treated Lindo like an object to be bartered between families. Lindo experiences depression being trapped in this lifestyle, so she decides to flee to America in order to escape it. When reminiscing on her marriage Lindo says, “I had no choice, now or later. That was how backward families in the country were. We were always the last to give up stupid old-fashioned customs” (Tan ). Similar to the mother in the beginning, Tan creates appeal to pathos, forcing the reader to sympathize with Lindo. The reader’s sympathy to Lindo allows Tan to expand on the larger issue of sexism, creating an emotional and educational tone in order to coax the reader into, again, understanding the true scale of sexism. Tan drilling this larger idea of sexism into readers changes the reader’s perspective. With new perspective, readers notice the need for change to establish equality between both sexes. Therefore, Tan is using her writing as a tool for a deeper subject: exciting change within the world, and thus, exemplifying Jong’s words.
In the novel, Paradise of the Blind, written by Duong Thu Huong originally in Vietnamese and translated into English by Phan Huy Duong and Nina Mcpherson, the author constructs characters Aunt Tam and Uncle Chinh as analogs of conflicting political ideologies of 20th century Vietnam in order to display her opinions on its effectiveness in attaining proclaimed paradise. The characters are constructed to differently express the author’s voice towards extremist ideologies, Uncle Chinh
In his book Member of the Club, Lawrence Otis Graham details the struggles of living as a black student at Princeton University. The chapter “The Underside of Paradise” opens up with a quote by Paul Robeson that compared living in Princeton to living in a southern plantation. Despite Graham attending Princeton three decades later, he found the quote to be accurate in describing his own student experience at the esteemed college where subtle but real racial segregation divided the campus. Through an analysis with the functionalist perspective, the tension and division between the white and black students can be understood as a result of organic solidarity. Ultimately, the two groups of people are part of an interconnected society. However, they are separated by issues of civil rights. Black students are able to relate to the injustices that take place in the world. However, white students are often unable to do so and remain indifferent and separated from the issues. An example can be seen when Graham participated in the antiapartheid movement and his roommate Steve confronted Graham and asked, “Please don’t get offended by this, but do blacks really think Americans are so terrible, and that things are so racist and unfair in the United States?” (Graham, 1995, p. 204). In a sense, the racial segregation could also be seen as a mechanism to prevent conflict between the two groups. As Emile Durkheim (1972) states, “The closer functions approach one-another, however, the more
Ninh’s novel jumps between flashbacks of the war and Kien’s love affairs, in particular one with his childhood sweetheart Phuong. Ninh uses the reoccurring theme of Kien’s love, or loss of love, as a metaphor for the impact the war had on the Vietnamese people. The original title of the novel is actually The Destiny of Love. Kien likens the war to a soldiers love saying, “The sorrow of war inside a soldier’s heart was in a strange way similar to the sorrow of love. It was a kind of nostalgia…It was a sadness, a missing, a pain which could send one soaring back into the past” (Ninh, 94). Kien does find himself often reminiscing of his young innocent love with Phuong. The end of the novel focuses
Family loyalty in China has had a tumultuous past filled with fluctuation between remaining loyal to the state, yet also remaining loyal to blood relatives. In the autobiography that also serves as a biography, Wild Swans, by Jung Chang, this is seen. The book, which outlines the biographies of the author’s grandmother and mother, as well as her own autobiography, gives an interesting look into the lives of the Chinese throughout the 20th century. This book is beyond eye opening, and is truly a raw glimpse into the daily lives of women throughout China, struggling with situations that no human should ever be thrown into. I loved this book and was truly scared about the world that it opened me up to. The book does many things well, but also has its faults. The author consistently and clearly exemplifies the social hierarchy that consumes China, as well as its obsession with cultural stagnancy. The author also gives intense imagery that thrusts the reader into the scene, and creates a new reality showcasing the truths of China. Although both of those things take main stage in the book, there are a few weaknesses in the book. One, asking the question of how she had such clear anecdotes on her grandmother and mother’s life, how did she have such intimate details? The second shortcoming that Jung Chang had a subjective view of China, partly being that she loves China despite the cards it has dealt her. Her life was not short of hardships, but her family was typically