Love Themes in The Contemporary Literature of Kurt Vonnegut

In contemporary literature, love is a popular theme in many character based fictional works. The issue of love arises from many various vantage points. These different loves include romantic love between man and woman, friendship love, parental love, and love which is directed from an individual toward a community or cause.

The demonstration of each of these different types of love in modern fiction is done on a character to character basis. In Michael Doherty's "Those Tender Mayfly Childhood Sweetheart Games," Toni Morrison's Sula, John Doble's "The Magic Show," and Kurt Vonnegut's "Report on the Barnhouse Effect," each author uses a different type of love in their fictional works and demonstrates through the characters involved how love is a struggle.

In short story "Those Tender Mayfly Childhood Sweetheart Games," Michael Doherty portrays love within his plot as a romantic love between a man and a woman. In the story, this romantic love is found between the narrator and Sophia, Sophia and Moose, and Sophia and Alex. The love between the narrator and Sophia is a one sided love affair, in which the narrator's love for Sophia is known but no declaration of love has been made by either person. Sophia and Moose are another example of romantic love.

In this love, Moose seemingly forces his love on Sophia, who submits to his pressures and becomes his lover. The love between Sophia and Alex, a long-distance boyfriend, is a neglected love because the two lovers are separated and as we later find out Alex has found a new love. In all these examples from Doherty's work, the author portrays the characters relationships as a struggle for happy love. The struggles of each relationship between characters is a primary example of how contemporary authors use romantic love to show the challenge of achieving happiness in love.

In the novel Sula, Toni Morrison demonstrates love within her story as a friendship love between two characters. The friendship love in Sula is between the main characters Nel and Sula, who are two young twelve-year-old, African America girls in a 1920's setting. The love and bond of friendship stems between these two characters out of a lack of any other type of love in their life. Nel and Sula need this friendship love, because the households that both girls grow up in lack in parental love due to "distant mothers and incomprehensible fathers." Whereas Doherty showed the actions of love as a struggle, Morrison has shown love through friendship and the happiness it provides as the result of struggle.

In the short story "The Magic Show," John Doble provides an example of the difficulties and challenges of achieving happiness through parental love. In Doble's work, the reader encounters the main character Dan Cahill as he narrates his experiences with his father to a therapist. Due to the framework of the narration, the audience immediately knows a struggle exist between Dan and his surroundings. Doble shows this struggle as Dan's broken happiness about the relationship between him and his father.

Previously, Dan and his father had a loving, happy father-son relationship, which is demonstrated by Dan's account of the magic show put on by the Kiwanis when he was twelve-years-old. Doble writes, "When I was 12, we were still buds. That night especially." On the opposite end, Dan also provides a detailed story about a night later in his teenage years when he was feeling depressed and was late for a special dinner one night. The story concluded with Dan and his father fighting and eventually resulting in Dan's father pushing him though a glass door. The shattering of this glass metaphorically symbolizes the shattering of a fragile parental-child relationship.

The glass metaphor brings to the forefront of the reader's mind and captures the essence of the challenges and fragility involve in trying to achieve a happy love.

In the satire "Report on the Barnhouse Effect," Kurt Vonnegut uses the relationship between man and a cause to present the theme of love and its complications. Vonnegut's plot involves the character Professor Barnhouse who discovers a method called "dynamopsychism" which uses the mind to perform any task, including destroying things. The government confronts Barnhouse with the task of using his new powers as a national defense tool. Morality and ethics challenge Barnhouse in this instance and for the first time the reader notices his love for his community takes precedence over his love for his professional work.

Barnhouse confirms this choice in loves when he disappears and uses his powers for good cause by destroying weapons in countries all over the world. Vonnegut demonstrates this when he writes, "I have humane reasons for going off." Barnhouse demonstrates his love of human kind and the world he lives in by eliminating weapons, instead of becoming a weapon. Love for community is similar to the others, because it is demonstrates in the midst of struggles and challenges just like the other three types.

In conclusion, the use of different types of love and the struggles to achieve them happily are a significant theme used in contemporary fiction. Romantic love, friendship love, family love, and community love are all types of love that present characters in modern works with challenges in their efforts to achieve them in a satisfying manner. Authors such as Michael Doherty, Toni Morrison, John Doble, and Kurt Vonnegut all uses love thematically in their literature to grow plot lines amongst the challenges love presents.

These challenges include determining who loves whom, dealing with a missing type of love, recovering from a broken love, or even choosing between two loves. In each of the works, all these obstacles are created or overcome by love. The thematic use of love and relationships is a common and exemplary way to build characters, and although love may not be the main plot, it is just as essential to character based fiction.