Love and Possession

The essence of love is possession. Or at least we believe after we have read Andre Dubus's short story "Killings", which is about love and loss. Dubus implicitly explores the idea of the loss of love - in the most terrible way possible, for the story centers on a father's loss of his son to murder - as a form of possession and in doing so allows us to understand not only the power of love but something of its darker nature. He makes us understand why we speak of the end of love as a "loss", using the same metaphor that we use to describe a lost fortune or a lost plot of family land. Certainly Matt loves his son, Frank, and certainly he grieves for his death. But mostly what he feels is the fact that something that was his - his son, his love for his son, his son's love for him - has been taken from him. And this loss - this theft - is something that he determines that he must avenge. The story is thus a retelling of the neoclassical revenge tale as embodied in a work like Othello, although with a modern moral.

It has been argued that there is in fact only one story, and that all the stories that have ever been told around campfires or on the long march over the Bering Land Bridge or in chat rooms are merely different versions of this story, which is the quest for something that has been lost, as Smith (1991) suggests. Such quests may center on physical objects that must be found - such as the Grail - or sometimes cast away (as is the case with the Ring in Tolkien's triology)

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way at the body of his son's lover: Matt wants to be able to possess those people he loves or desires and he sees this as his right. There is no shame in the passage above: We do not hear Matt berate himself for wanting a woman that he should have no desire for. The use of a desireable - and often fundamentally damaged - female as the motivator of revenge between men (who see that woman as a possession of theirs) is an essential element of the classic revenge story. Without stretching very much at all we can see this modern short story as a retelling of any one of a number of revenge tales from Sophocles to Shakespeare (Garner and Sprengnether 82). Indeed, this story can be seen as a retelling of the story of Hamlet, although the revenge is reversed here, with the father revenging the son rather than the son the father. Mary Ann is a combination of Ophelia and Gertrude. Hamlet rejects Ophelia because she is all innocence: Oph: Could beauty, my lord, have better commerce than with honesty? Ham: Ay, truly; for the power of beauty will sooner transform honesty from what it is to a bawd than the force of honesty can translate beauty into its likeness. This was sometimes a paradox, but now the time gives it proof. I did love you o

Category: Psychology - L