Thou Shalt Love!: The Contemporary Relevance of Rumi in Elif Shafak’s The Forty Rules of Love- a Character Based Study Establishing Love as the Central Theme of the Novel and Humanity (Published)
This paper aims to analyse Love and its dearth in today’s world that forms the crux of Elif Shafak’s novel The Forty Rules of Love. The novel connects human predicament of the thirteenth century of Rumi- a poet, and his Sufi friend Shams, with the twenty-first century of Ella and her mystic friend cum lover Aziz. The novel presents several Sufi tenets, but it is Elif’s conviction of love that firmly holds the Sufi theme in the novel, according it with magnitude and potency. Achieving oneness with the creator is the goal of mankind, and it is only possible through spirituality which, in turn, is indispensable to love. Therefore, Love forms the substratum of the novel in question. This paper scrutinizes Elif’s portrayal of characters and their predicaments illustrating how the Oneness can be achieved despite differences through the path of love and love alone.
Keywords: Faith, Love, Sufism, human-predicament, humanity, oneness
Love, Lust and Life: An Analysis of Paulo Coelho’s Adultery (Published)
There is absolutely no worse death curse than the humdrum daily existence of the living dead,” says Anthon St. Maarten, which is the predicament of the heroine of Paulo Coelho’s Adultery, Linda. The introduction itself unfolds that she is a journalist, married with two children and has an affluent lifestyle. Despite having no reasons to worry, she is bored because she feels a kind of lack of desire to live because of her secured and predefined routine existence with no adventure. To escape from her mundane routine, Linda resolves to do away with her “missing joy with something more concrete – a man.” She gets along with a high school boyfriend turned politician who uses her simply for his sexual appetite. On the contrary, Linda pines for him and ponders that she is in love with him. She excitedly admits that, “It’s thrilling to fight for a love that’s entirely unrequited.” This new experience of having no predefined notions, unpredictable behaviour of Jacob drive her crazy to that extent where she suffers emotional imbalance and opts life-changing decisions. At the end, when she paraglides in Switzerland, she has a revelation that the “world is perfect,” and to “love abundantly is to live abundantly.
Keywords: Adultery, Linda, Love, Lust, Marriage, Paulo Coelho, sex
Joyce’s “Araby”: From Innocence to Experience (Published)
ABSTRACT: James Joyce’s short story “Araby” depicts an adolescent boy’s experience of the bleakness of reality gained through the loss of innocence. The boy undergoes the tribulations of real life while in quest of ideal beauty, love and romance. The story opens with a description of the Dublin neighbourhood–the ‘blind’ North Richmond Street at the end of which the boy lives with his uncle and aunt in an uninhabited house in conservative Catholic cultures. All these are intimated with dismal surroundings suggesting disappointment from the very outset. This gloomy and dreary atmosphere narrows down the boy’s world and confines his spirit. Everywhere in his dark surroundings, the lonely, imaginative, and isolated boy seeks the ‘light’ and a relish of romance. Into this world of darkness appears a girl, Mangan’s sister. To the boy, the girl is the embodiment of romance and ideal beauty. She is the light in his romantic fantasy, someone who will lift him out of darkness he believes. But, when he is entrapped in physical attraction with her, the girl becomes a threat to the boy’s religious faith and likewise leads him away from a state of innocence because Dublin is “a place of asceticism where desire and sensuality are seen as immoral”1. The boy, however, wishes to win her over by bringing her a gift from an oriental bazaar, Araby, which, to his young heart, is also an epitome of ideal beauty and romantic grandeur. As the boy is growing up, the bazaar gets emblematic for the difficulty of the adult world in which the boy fails to navigate. His dreams crumble. This Araby, like a silent assassin, devours his all fancies and yearnings. He experiences a shattering epiphany, his boyish fantasies are dashed by the grim realities of life in Dublin and consequently he develops a new perspective on life. Therefore, this paper is an attempt to substantiate how a young boy gains experience through the loss of his innocence.
KEYWORDS: Araby, Adolescence, Disillusionment, Experience, Innocence, Love
Keywords: Adolescence, Araby, Disillusionment, Experience, Innocence, Love
Relationships Redefined: An Analysis of Anita Brookner’s The Bay of Angels (Published)
The contemporary novelist, Anita Brookner’s novels bring to light how the feminine self is also a patchwork of social injunctions as well as images inscribed in the literary canon. Her novels fictionalize the self in the process of rethinking and seeking its worth through a more meaningful identity than just the self-denying or sexually desirable conceptions of womanhood, reflected through cultural representations. Brookner’s novel, The Bay of Angels (2001) is an exploration of self-restraint, dignity and obligation within a tale of love and loneliness. Being orphaned and dejected by her flirtatious lover, Adam, she hopes to have a lifelong commitment characterized by certainty. Finally, Zoë happily accepts the present arrangement and considers her relationship with Dr. Balbi a precious one as it has involved no change of character, no effort to meet each other’s requirements. Zoë’s idea of love shows her broad vision as she does not want the man she loves for herself alone but is generous enough to let him share his affections with his helpless sister. This attitude of not wanting to be loved for oneself alone, in the broader sense, serves as the foundation for a healthy and harmonious society.
Keywords: Contemporary, Feminine sensibility, Harmony, Loneliness, Love, womanhood
Chokher Bali: A Collage of Diverse Paradigms of Love and Sexuality (Published)
Chokher Bali is an outcome of immense sensitivity on the part of the novelist, Rabindranath Tagore, who was interested in documentation of human psychology in his novels. Tagore could no longer take delight in dead metaphors of idealism, at a time when he perceived that the whole world around him was rapidly changing. Written during the phase of cultural transition, the novel presents the confusing state of slippages from moral line, which Tagore has considered more obvious than sinful. It was almost like beating the same line, if the novelists sought to preserve in their novels moral ideals and virtues in traditional style. Tagore, in Chokher Bali also, like in his other novels portrays human beings in the light of their idiosyncrasies, peculiarities, experiments and follies
Keywords: Chokher Bali, Human Psychology, Love, Sexuality, Vovels
Sympathy, Hospitality and Love in Nadine Gordimer’s The Pick Up (Review Completed - Accepted)
This paper sets out to discuss the extent to which the trinity of sympathy, hospitality and love are interwoven in Nadine Gordimer’s The Pick Up. To be sure, this postliberation novel is a stunning tribute to what Arthur Schopenhauer calls “loving-kindness” which encompasses respect for ‘otherness’ and rejection of intolerance in any shape or form. As a one-time antiapartheid activist driven by her unflinching belief in deep-dyed liberal values, Nadine Gordimer reminds us through the casting of her lead characters, to wit Julie and Abdu, that human action must always be tinged with a measure of compassion and acceptance of diversity, or else the ravages of egoism and absence of empathy will doom us. This powerful work of fiction, indeed, teaches us that it is only through the steady exercise of compassion that one can carry out one’s responsibility for the ‘other’
Keywords: Hospitality, Liberalism, Love, Otherness, Sympathy