Searching Love and Caring in A Complicated Kindness Love is an assortment of emotions, states, and dispositions that range from interpersonal affections. It can also be a virtue representing human graciousness, sympathy, and friendship. Among all types of love, family love is undoubtedly the most important. In the novel, although the concept of love and caring are expressed indirectly through one’s thoughts and actions, it can easily be noticed. Nomi is introverted, she hides her secrets and writes her contemplations. “The only thing I [need] to know [is] that we [are] all going to live forever, together, happily, in heaven with god without pain and sadness and sin. (Toews 17)” Nomi believes that as long as her whole family …show more content…
Nomi is full of curiosity, she cares about the ones she love. Due to Nomi’s hatred toward The Mouth’s manipulation, she may not realize that she actually loves him. “The Mouth pass by the window, slowly, in faded green housecoat he’d only half-heartedly closed with what looked like and old tie. I [stare] at his profile as he [stands] with his hand on the stove, a little bent over, head down and motionless…...Then he [raises] his head again and [walks] again very, very slowly……. I [notice] my mom leaning her head against the window over the kitchen sink the very same way The Mouth [leans] his head against the fan part of his stove.” (Toews 51- 52) The fact that Nomi stops and watches The Mouth reveals her caring. The Mouth is often dehumanized as an evil figure. The simple description of The Mouth walking comfortably with his housecoat shows his humanity - he is just like us. On the other hand, the similar gesture of The Mouth and Trudie reminds Nomi that he is her Uncle Hans, her family. She should love him as she loves the rest of her family. “Trudie [starts] going for long walks at night. During the day, at home, she’d still do things like housework and cooking but she almost entirely [stops] speaking. I [come] home from whatever one afternoon to find her and my dad standing in the middle of the kitchen in each other’s arm with tears streaming down their faces. What’s wrong? I [ask]. And …show more content…
“In the winter, she’d warm up my bed for me by lying in it for twenty minutes while I [have] my Saturday-night bath. (Toews 19)” This memory may appear to be excessively common, however, the smallest detail indicates Trudie’s love for Nomi even she does not recognize. Mother gives the best to their kids, prepares everything for them and makes them feel comfortable. The memory indicates how Trudie thinks about Nomi. “[Has] Trudie [be] fooling around with the idea of leaving herself and then [stash] this card into Tash’s dresser. If so, where [is] my card? But also, Tash left months before my mom [does] which would mean…...I don’t know……It’s raining questions around here. A person [will] have [drown] in them.” (Toews 97) Nomi compares herself with Tash and overthinks. Nomi can be easily influenced by the things that are shown in front of her. For example, “Travis and his fake wife [are] smoking a joint behind the sod hut and laughing as though they were enjoying themselves.” (Toews 185) When Nomi sees Travis smoking with his colleagues in the museum, she becomes jealous and thinks that Travis is flirting with that girl. Since Nomi has a low self-esteem, she feels depressed, and thus, she doubts about Trudie’s love. “Tell her! Tell her it’s not true. Tell her they are stories. You know nothing about love, nothing. You know nothing
When we think about the force that holds the world together and what makes humans different from animals, one answer comes to our minds - that humans can love. Love is a state of mind that cannot be defined easily but can be experienced by everyone. Love is very complicated. In fact it is so complicated that a person in love may be misunderstood to be acting in an extremely foolish manner by other people. The complexity of love is displayed in Rostand’s masterpiece drama Cyrano de Bergerac. This is accomplished by two characters that love the same woman and in the course neither one achieves love in utter perfection.
In Maxine Kingston’s “No Name Woman” she retells the story about a tragic past family secret. Kingston reveals the horrible family dishonor of her aunt who committed suicide, and murdered her newborn son, by jumping into the family well in China. She continues to explain her thoughts and emotions evoked from her aunt’s actions. As time passes, Kingston’s opinion and thoughts change and her perspective is altered. Kingston shows an evolutionary change in opinion toward her aunt by explaining her different thoughts in different stages of her life.
Love and affection is an indispensable part of human life. In different culture love may appear differently. In the poem “My god my lotus” lovers responded to each other differently than in the poem “Fishhawk”. Likewise, the presentation of female sexuality, gender disparity and presentation of love were shown inversely in these two poems. Some may argue that love in the past was not as same as love in present. However, we can still find some lovers who are staying with their partners just to maintain the relationship. We may also find some lovers having relationship only because of self-interest. However, a love relationship should always be out of self-interest and must be based on mutual interest. A love usually obtains its perfectness when it develops from both partners equally and with same affection.
Constancia from "Abuela Invents the Zero" has the experience of losing her grandmother in the church. Instead of being a good granddaughter and searching high and low for her grandmother, Constancia hides herself in embarrassment, and abandons her grandmother. "I put my hands over my face like I’m praying, but it’s really to hide my burning cheeks. I would like for her to disappear. I just know that on Monday my friends, and my enemies, in the barrio will have a lot of senile grandmother jokes to tell in front of me. I am frozen to my seat. So the same woman who wants me dead on the spot does it for me. She makes a big deal out of getting up and hurrying to get Abuela." So, Connie did not care about finding her grandmother, but cared about her reputation with her friends. So, another woman at the church had to look for her grandmother. After this, when her grandmother is found, Connie's grandmother is hurt and tells her "You made me feel like a zero, like a nothing." Then Constancia feels bad and has to talk to her grandmother. So going through the experience of losing her grandmother in a church, and then not even bothering to look for her, and then feeling bad afterwards has shaped Connie's values to not caring about the feelings of her grandmother to caring about what she says and does to her, and maybe it opened up her eyes to valuing all of her family member's and
Several times, silence is oppressive due to the fact it stunts communication and relationships within the family. For instance, when Naomi is molested by Old Man Gower, in which he tells her to defer from telling her mother this information for obvious reasons. A. Lynne Magnussen observes the following: “Before Gower: knowledge between mother and child is antecedent to words. After Gower: the silence hides a secret betrayal” (Magnussen 8). This explains how Naomi’s relationship with her mother never became vocal, let alone overly vocal, before the secrets began with Old Man Gower. The weight of the secret strained the relationship, but Naomi was the only one who was able to recognize the situation since her mother had no part. Naomi herself describes the experience as a mountain splitting in half: “[Naomi’s] mother is on one side of the rift. I am on the other. We cannot reach each other” (Kogawa 77). In addition to this instance, the rest of Naomi’s story is also driven by oppressive silence in the government’s treatment to the Japanese-Canadians. They were evicted from their homes and businesses without any guarantee that they would see any of their possessions again. Eventually, this lead to the Japanese-Canadian community being forced into ghost towns to build up a new life. Their letters were
Love is an emotion in which many people consider complicated. It is difficult to give a precise definition to an emotion, but several sources have attempted to do so including the Bible and different dictionaries. There are also several types of love such as love for one’s family, pets, and love for a partner. A summarization of the overall emotion itself could be classified as feelings of comfort and warmth, as well as wanting to do what is in one’s power to better the life of the one he loves. A common influence on literature is love. One work which experiences love in its plot is Laura Equivel’s “Like Water for Chocolate.” In the work, two characters named Pedro and Tita have a complicated relationship, but what they feel is love.
Most of the time we perceive what others say about us to be believable. We retell those stories without even wondering if their stories even pertain to us. Sometimes we don’t comprehend what their motives are especially are loved ones. The reason sometimes we don’t comprehend because their motives are unappealing to our interest. From the autobiographies of Dawn Weiner, the main character from Welcome to the Dollhouse, and Thea Atwell from The Yonhalassee Riding Camp for Girls, they are affected by parental neglect during the time they are going through adolescent hormones.
She begins talking about her childhood and who raised her until she was three years old. The woman who raised her was Thrupkaew’s “auntie”, a distant relative of the family. The speaker remembers “the thick, straight hair, and how it would come around [her] like a curtain when she bent to pick [her] up” (Thrupkaew). She remembers her soft Thai accent, the way she would cling to her auntie even if she just needed to go to the bathroom. But she also remembers that her auntie would be “beaten and slapped by another member of my family. [She] remembers screaming hysterically and wanting it to stop, as [she] did every single time it happened, for things as minor as…being a little late” (Thrupkaew). She couldn’t bear to see her beloved family member in so much pain, so she fought with the only tool she had: her voice. Instead of ceasing, her auntie was just beaten behind closed doors. It’s so heart-breaking for experiencing this as a little girl, her innocence stolen at such a young age. For those who have close family, how would it make you feel if someone you loved was beaten right in front of you? By sharing her story, Thrupkaew uses emotion to convey her feelings about human
...e idea of living peacefully she did what Nana did to her. She took her childish dream version of the situation and turned it into reality. Even though it was not the nicest way of telling her that she was wrong it was the best. Since she loved)((use more in P))) her family she decided to be more direct and use tough love to save everyone.
Despite being one of the most powerful emotions, the definition of love cannot be encompassed in one, singular statement. However, it can be said that love is a fundamental life force experienced by all beings, humans and animals alike. The complexity of love can be explained by the fact that there are many different types of love that exist. Romantic love is characterized by feelings of desire and affection between two people. Parental love highlights the protective, caring relationship shared by parent and child. Platonic love is the supportive, closely-knit connection that occurs among friends. While love in all forms is beautiful, the nature of love can sometimes become obsessive, and fog all other thoughts that an individual has. This obsessiveness, in turn, can have disastrous effects on the individual and those around him or her. In literature, the obsessive love often serves as the central focus of books, short stories, plays, and poems. The Great
... she chooses not to withdraw from it like Holden does. Nomi and Holden’s outlooks on life at the novels’ beginnings and the hope present in their respective endings further illustrate that people are able grow from their experiences only after taking time to reflect upon them. Through Nomi and Holden’s evolution over the course of A Complicated Kindness and The Catcher in the Rye, both Jerome David Salinger and Miriam Toews demonstrate that it is only through introspection that people are able to truly mature and grow. Without this introspection, people begin to embody the traits they hate about others in fantasy worlds that make them unable to relate to the real one.
Her family life is depicted with contradictions of order and chaos, love and animosity, conventionality and avant-garde. Although the underlying story of her father’s dark secret was troubling, it lends itself to a better understanding of the family dynamics and what was normal for her family. The author doesn’t seem to suggest that her father’s behavior was acceptable or even tolerable. However, the ending of this excerpt leaves the reader with an undeniable sense that the author felt a connection to her father even if it wasn’t one that was desirable. This is best understood with her reaction to his suicide when she states, “But his absence resonated retroactively, echoing back through all the time I knew him. Maybe it was the converse of the way amputees feel pain in a missing limb.” (pg. 399)
The Narrator’s family treats her like a monster by resenting and neglecting her, faking her death, and locking her in her room all day. The Narrator’s family resents her, proof of this is found when the Narrator states “[My mother] came and went as quickly as she could.
Upon finishing A Complicated Kindness, I felt a sense of relief. Finally, Nomi was free. What’s interesting is that at the end of the novel Nomi doesn’t leave the community, although she now has the freedom to thanks to her father, Ray, for leaving. It surprised me that Ray left, however, it was the only way that Nomi could be free. Nomi had promised her father she would never leave him however after Nomi was excommunicated Ray knew that the only way for Nomi to leave was if he left. It was confusing why the family could not move all together at the beginning of the story? That would have saved much heartache and suffering. I suppose it’s like what Nomi said, that Trudie did not want to force Ray to choose between the church and his
Next let us examine Mariam's plight. She is denied the chance to go to school. "What's the sense schooling a girl like you? It's like shinning a spitspoon." She lives with a cruel mother. "You are a clumsy little harami. This is my reward for everything I've endured. An heirloom-breaking, clumsy little harmi"(4). She has a neglectful father. "Mariam kept thinking of his face in the upstairs window. He let her sleep on the street. On the street. Mariam cried lying down"(35). Her mother commits suicide and Mariam blames herself. "You stop that. These thoughts are no good, Mariam jo. You hear me, child? No good. They will destroy you. It wasn't your fault. It wasn't your fault no". Mariam nodded, but as desperately as she wanted to she could not bring herself to believe him"(44). She is forced into marriage to a man she does not love. "I don't want to," Mariam said. She looked at Jalil. "I don't want this. Don't make me"(47). She is sent to live in a strange city were she does not know anyone. She has a physically abusive husband. "Then he was gone, leaving Mariam to spit out pebbles, blood, and the fragments of two broken molars"(104). Her husband is cruel and says hurtful words to her. She can not do anything right in his eyes. When he is not ignoring her he is being verbally or physically abusive towards her.