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.