(urth) HOME FIRES finished thoughts (spoilers)
Fernando Gouvea
fqgouvea at colby.edu
Wed Aug 21 07:13:17 PDT 2013
I like "the fragility of tenacity" as well. But no novel has a single
theme or point.
Wolfe seems to always have something about the nature of love in his
novels, and there's something here as well. Skip remembers his past
relationship to Chelle as a great romance. He has cultivated and
nurtured this memory, and it has grown into something of huge
significance for him.
But not Chelle. She remembers a relatively recent childish affair, one
that happened not so long ago and has been eclipsed in intensity by
whatever happened to her in the war.
So one thing Wolfe is pointing to is the difference between the reality
of a loving relationship and our romanticized ideas of what that might
be. He echoes that with the distinction between a contract and a
wedding, a contracta and a wife.
And this gives us a clue about why Skip goes off to the war at the end.
He has realized that somehow the big difference in lived experience
needs to be patched up, and, like many Wolfe heroes in love, sets out to
bridge whatever differences are there. We are not told whether it will
actually work; my guess is that it probably won't.
Of course there's a lot more going on. Wolfe seems to take a basic story
(and for all I know it could have been the idea I outlined above) and
keeps complicating it more and more, adding wrinkles and mysteries as he
goes. There's certainly a distopian element in the book, in which many
fears about where we are going are made concrete. It's very close to
being a hopeless world. Perhaps this is why being in love with Chelle is
so central to Skip's own identity: he has little else left.
Fernando
On 8/20/2013 8:09 PM, Brian Doherty wrote:
> What would people say the theme/point of the novel is? The tenacity of
> love? The fragility of identity? Or the tenacity of identity?
--
=============================================================
Fernando Q. Gouvea http://www.colby.edu/~fqgouvea
Carter Professor and Chair
Dept. of Mathematics and Statistics
Colby College Editor, Carus Mathematical Monographs
5836 Mayflower Hill Editor, MAA Reviews
Waterville, ME 04901 http://www.maa.org/publications/maa-reviews
Zounds! I was never so bethumped with words since I first called my brother's father dad.
-- William Shakespeare, "King John"
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