Love In Jon Krakauer's Dangerous Illusions

Imagine a man held against his will. Ethan Frome thinks of himself as a “prisoner” (Wharton 74). He is detained from a life he has always imagined because of the accident with Mattie Silver. “The inexorable facts closed in on him like a prison-warder handcuffing a convict” (Wharton 74). Ethan Frome has realized he has to face the consequences of being infatuated with Mattie Silver forever. He becomes entwined with two “sickly “controlling women, a “warped right side” and life full of regrets. Edith Wharton shows Ethan “checking each step like the jerk of a chain” (Wharton 1). Every step Ethan takes into getting into the right path, trouble gets in his way. Starkfield being “being in an exhausted receiver” (Wharton 13) makes him feels he will be stuck in the darkness for eternity. For

Tracing back to the year that changed Ethan Frome’s life forever, the reader finds themselves outside of a church where Ethan Frome is mesmerized by the sight of this girl, Mattie Silver, who is actually his wife’s sister. When Mattie

Although Frome can be held responsible for his moral inactivity, he can be considered a morally inadequate man in his present state. His inadequacy, however, was not a constant in life or a sudden occurrence-- it snowballed from his youth and finally solidified through the ‘smash-up’. His earlier experiences in a university and the joy it brought him was quickly interrupted after a year by his sickly parents. The unfortunate circumstance forces Ethan Frome to move back to the depressing Starkfield he had just escaped. His parents’ illnesses bring along Zenobia, who would be another future, unseen oppression along with Starkfield. For years, Ethan lives in depressing conditions that decline as time goes on. The chance to finally leave them behind, however, comes in Mattie, Zenobia’s cousin and maid. Ethan’s inability to act on this chance of escape finally seals his fate when Mattie is paralyzed and he is critically injured. Although jinxed with unfortunate circumstances, Ethan Frome’s life could have been bettered if one small step or action was taken by him for himself with the intention to create personal joy or pleasure.

Lastly, Ethan’s greatest misfortune of being unable to have Mattie’s love due to his wife's domination led to the complete subordination of his character. Wharton emphasizes Ethan’s confinement to his wife Zeena by stating, “the inexorable facts closed in on him like a prison-warder handcuffing. There was no way out-none. He was a prisoner for life” (69). Ethan suffers in silence due to the duty of caring for his ill wife. The lack of being able to express his feelings for the woman he loves because of Zeena’s conniving control causes Ethan to feel trapped inside his own home. Another example that shows Zeena’s superiority towards Ethan when the narrator states, “now she had mastered him, and he abhorred her. Mattie was her relation, not his:

Has anyone heard the phrase “crazy in love”? Although some might say there is no truth in it, Kurt Vonnegut’s “EPICAC” provides an example of the emotion’s stronghold. Love is not only an emotion of the heart, but an emotion that can overpower the brain. The physiological and emotional influence can elicit irrational thoughts and behaviors of humans. One of Vonnegut’s themes is that love makes people do crazy things; sometimes to the extreme.

Curtis Judalet once said, “Love is as much of an object as an obsession, everybody wants it, everybody seeks it, but few ever achieve it, those who do will cherish it, be lost in it, and among all never forget it.”. But what about those that don’t achieve it? Where will their obsession with love take them. In Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s One hundred years of solitude, key character Amaranta Buendia experiences extreme bouts of jealousy towards her sister Rebeca. This leads her to develop a rancor towards love, and those who express their love to her. Amaranta ends up living a life of regret, with solitude as a result. In Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude, Amaranta displays a spiteful demeanour towards her sister; she develops an inability to display love, and finally ends up living a life of solitude. Thus, one’s inability to love will eventually lead to a life of solitude.

“If love is judged by its visible effects, it often looks more like hatred.” As stated in the quote, individuals tend to show their affection towards their loved ones in a rather aggressive fashion thus the process of expressing one’s love to another is often interpreted as hatred. However, this misinterpretation only occurs when one’s treatment of love is judged solely based on the visually observable aspects. These actions actually show an insight into their genuine love, but the clumsiness in expressing is what people mistakenly perceive as “loathing” and “detestation.” As a result, the relationship between individuals develop contrary to the original intents as it is followed by individual’s actions, inevitably arousing disputes. In William Gibson’s play based on Helen Keller’s life, The Miracle Worker, the characters also struggle with similar relationship conflicts revolving around the idea of visible love

Desire vs. Morality and Duty: Throughout the novel, Ethan seems to struggle with managing his desire for Mattie and his duty as a husband. This theme is apparent throughout the entirety of the novella. It starts before the book even begins. Ethan, in the first chapter, admits to often walking Mattie, his wife’s cousin, home just to spend few minutes alone with her. However it is first mentioned in the book when Ethan is standing alone, just watching Mattie dance. He knows he has a wife to get back to, but yet all he can imagine is being in that party and being the one who is dancing passionately with Mattie. Although, his sense of duty and morality is not only because of his relationship with Zeena, but because he fears the way his society would react to such a scandal. Although his desire to leave Zeena, a sour and sickly old woman, is somewhat understandable, he knows that his society would shun him if he abandoned her for another woman. Later in the book, this theme is again apparent when Zeena must leave to see a new doctor about her illness. Ethan loses his sense of duty to her, and lies to Zeena so that he can spend time with the one he so desires. However in chapter nine, this theme is most apparent. After Zeena tells Ethan that she is to throw Mattie, the love of his life and the last force that could make him happy, out on the streets to make room for a new hired girl, Ethan devises a plan to run off with Mattie. He spends an entire night making

Most people throughout the world would think of love as an emotion of strong attraction and personal attachment of one individual towards something or somebody. However, this emotion doesn’t come without a range. Thus, you can confirm that the feeling of love from a mother to her son is different from that of a husband towards his wife. In the novel Lolita, written by Vladimir Nabokov we can appreciate several relationships between most of its characters, however, none of those associations are as interesting and bizarre as the one of the main characters of the novel and narrator Humbert Humbert and Dolores Haze “Lolita”.

Pablo Neruda was the pen name of Ricardo Eliezer Neftali Reyes y Basoalto, a poet who not only inspired lovers around the world but also gave voices to workers and miners and monumentalized the beauty of the Americas and his culture. Through his use of imagery, especially nature imagery, and symbolism, Pablo Neruda intertwines universal themes like love and patriotism with raw emotion and uses his subjectivity to create poems in a unique style. In fact, in an interview with Eric Bockstael, he said, “My ambition as a writer, if there is an ambition, is to write about all the things that I see, that I touch, that I know, that I love, or that I hate.”

Love is an obstacle that people face and must overcome rather than a goal people strive towards.

The theme of this novel is the social and moral concerns on Ethan’s desire to cheat on his wife with her cousin Mattie. Wharton makes Ethan’s desire to cheat on his wife, Zeena,

Every Day by David Levithan focuses on the protagonist A. Every Day is a fictional story that revolves around the interesting concept about the possibility of waking up in a new body every day. This obviously is impossible in real life but stimulates so many thoughts in the readers’ mind. This concept is what captures the readers’ eye and makes them want to read the novel immediately. A finds himself in this situation as he carefully goes through different peoples’ lives every single day. Rhiannon is just one of the people that A happens to stumble upon throughout his life as a drifter, an entity that switches bodies every day, and is quick to fall for her. Love plays a big role in the novel and can even be seen as the main conflict. The protagonist, A, from the fictional story, Every Day by David Levithan, increasingly becomes more and more reckless throughout the novel.

The taste of poison on his lips. The agony of knowledge that should have never been shared. Jhumpa Lahiri’s “A Temporary Matter” and William Faulkner’s “A Rose for Emily” both speak to the universal human theme, love, by exploring how we often hurt most those we love most. In order to keep her love forever, Miss Emily poisons her lover. In realization of the end of their marriage, Shukumar retributes his wife’s disclosure of her new, individual apartment with a description of their unborn son, something Shoba never wanted to know. In both short stories, the characters love, or loved, each other, yet something corrupts their love and their relationship, be it the psychological and sociological repercussions of an

Love is a fragile dance. I am going to tell crucial key factor in my life. I was one of those children that was always singled out being my parents were divorced. When I was younger, having divorced parents was rare, however now a days it's rare to see parents still together. I’m not going to lie it definitely has been a struggle, but thankfully I always have a friend or family member I can talk to.