Hyatt Hammad
Conflict of
Literature
1/29/15
Blog/
Passage Analysis 2 (The Surrendered): All’s Fair in Love and War
Throughout
his novel The Surrendered, Chang-Rae
Lee depicts how war changes the way people perceive and interact with others; soldiers
and civilians alike can become survival-driven to the point of cruelty and
violence, and sometimes only love and filial ties can ensure solidarity among
people. However, even these ties can dissolve in the face of atrocity and
death. June, the main character, realizes the limitations and drawbacks of love
while in search of her son, Nicholas: “For she had indeed offered Nicholas
everything she had been capable of giving, and more even as she knew by the
time he was three that it might somehow never be enough. Perhaps no matter what
you did you could never love someone out of his nature, love someone out of his
fate. Love, she had come to believe, had no such power” (Lee 245). Throughout
the story, we see how June is powerless to protect or change the fate of her
loved ones. In the beginning when June does everything in her power to care for
her two younger siblings, they end up losing their lives in a train accident,
and she is forced to leave her dying brother and her already deceased sister in
order to save herself. When June lives at the orphanage, Sylvie does her best
to show affection and kindness towards June; however, this does not stop June
from stealing Sylvie’s most precious book, A
Memory of Solferino. When June gets older and has Nicholas she does love
him to the best of her ability, but in a strict and almost disconnected way. It
could be argued that this disconnection ultimately leads to Nicholas leaving
the country and stealing Sylvie’s book from June, illustrating again the inability
to change someone, no matter how much you care for them. Though June’s theory
of the ineffectiveness of love might not hold when analyzing other characters
(such as Sylvie, whose mother, father, and tutor, Benjamin, sacrificed their
own lives to save her when she was a child), one could interpret June’s experiences
as a statement about love in general, showing how love and blood ties do not
automatically trump selfishness, self-preservation, human nature, or the inability
to alter fate in times of bloodshed and despair.
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