We all experience heartbreak in our own way, but books teach us that, despite what we think, we are not the only ones who have experienced and felt this peculiar heartbreak, in fact, most likely, in reality, everyone can identify with it. what happens to us
And it is that in literature there are many people who have lost the love of their lives. Either for noble causes or for mistakes of the past, even not through your fault but through that of your partner or due to even greater circumstances.
Books teach us that love is perhaps the greatest feeling we can experience, but also that it can be fleeting, finite, and above all, extremely fragile.
These are 5 examples of heartbreak in literature that you will love.
because he doesn’t love you anymore
At the beginning of the book “Conjunto vacío” by Veronica Gerber, her boyfriend, El Tordo, leaves her for someone else. But more than feeling sadness at the betrayal, we see a deep melancholy for a relationship that started out great and fizzled out without anyone noticing. The betrayal of her partner cannot be justified, but it is implied that it is nothing more than a lack of love for the protagonist, and the story tells of life after failed love.
because it was destructive
Literature loves destructive couples, because we all go through that stage and we love to reflect on the pages and at the same time tell ourselves that we would never be like that. Just think of “Wuthering Heights” and the way in which the protagonists, despots, cold, calculating and self-centered treat each other just to fulfill old whims.
Or how about Richard Yates’ “Revolutionary Way” about a couple who always aspires for more, but when changes to achieve something new begin to take shape, Frank, the husband, begins to take out his anger on his wife, projecting how even the most sensitive men can hide monsters when their stability and comfort zone are disturbed.
for a hoax
Here the list is endless; Edward Rocherster in “Jane Eyre”, Clarissa Dalloway in “Mrs. Dalloway” or how about the whole plot of “100 Years of Solitude” full of betrayal and incest. However, perhaps one of the stories that people can identify with today is the story “The cheater’s guide to love” by Junot Díaz, in which Yunior, the protagonist, loses the love of his life after that she discovers that he has been unfaithful, not with one or two women, but with fifty.
The story shows the years after the breakup and the destructive path the character takes. Aware that he lost the best of his life, but at the same time proud and cynical, the story is a good way to understand contemporary love.
By the snatch of death
Another of the great themes of literature is love and death. There are those who are capable of going to the world of the dead for their loved one, we have seen it from literature to this day. But one of the most emotional stories in which a couple really loves each other and doesn’t part until death do them part, is “Love in the Time of Cholera.”
The novel, inspired by the story of García Márquez’s parents, has one of the most beautiful lines in literature:
…”He managed to recognize her in the tumult through the tears of the unrepeatable pain of dying without her, and he looked at her for the last time forever with the brightest, saddest and most grateful eyes that she had never seen him in half a century of life together, and managed to tell him with his last breath: -Only God knows how much I loved you”
For choosing your own path
For centuries women were relegated to the background in literature (always with some exceptions like Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz), but this has changed in recent years. “Dollhouse” by Henrik Ibsen is one of the first texts that shows a woman who begins believing that she is happy in her life as a wife and mother, but in the end she abandons all that to find herself, because she realizes that everything his life was a farce.
Only a few decades later, Doris Lessing published “The Golden Notebook”, a magnum opus with so many themes that love may seem like a minor thing, but it is admirable how Lessing shows that love, however romantic it may be, for a large part of women has also meant a chain that forces them to fulfill a role. This book shows that things should not be like this.
We all lose love under different circumstances. There are those who lose it over and over again, always waiting for something new, and there are those who find it and hope to never lose it, so much so that it is their own obsession for a perfect love that leads them to ruin. And you, how have you lost love?