In recent years, the age of maturity in Western cultures has been pushed higher and higher as more education becomes necessary to pursue employment opportunities. Struggling economies increasingly force children to rely on their parents after graduation. Despite the practical necessity of taking a few extra years to start their own business, the current generation entering the workforce is criticized for the time it takes them to support themselves. This stigma is rooted most deeply in our self-centered culture and fascination with individual success. Being independent means being admirable, being able to take care of yourself. Dependence is almost universally despised: Even though romantic relationships are encouraged, individuals are still expected to have clear goals and identities outside of their partner. These social patterns are reflected in modern literature. In Hanya Yanagihara's A Little Life and Elena Ferrante's Days of Abandonment and My Brilliant Friend, protagonists struggle to balance the desire to be independent and self-sufficient with the fulfillment that relationships can provide. For each, dependence on the other becomes a struggle to maintain boundaries and behave as one is accustomed. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an original essay Jude, the protagonist of A Little Life, is an incredibly private man who has suffered horrific abuse throughout his childhood and adolescence and is therefore incredibly reluctant to trust. His three closest friends are his college roommates, who learn very quickly that to be close to Jude “you let slip things that your instincts told you not to do, you explored the boundaries of your suspicions. You've realized that the test of your friendship is in keeping your distance. (Yanagihara 84). Jude refuses to comply with any attempt to find out more about his traumatic childhood and adolescence, because to do so would mean allowing someone else to carry the burden of what he went through. Likewise, he refuses to talk about his self-harm, both because the mechanism is essential to his functioning and because he is ashamed of it and the vulnerability it shows. Here his need for solitude harms him, as it takes away the opportunity to develop closer relationships to maintain the control he believes he has over the small sphere in which he operates. Her childhood has been so unstable that everything she can wield power over is incredibly precious: her edge, her routine, and the secrets she shares. He is closest to Willem, with whom he moves in after leaving college as neither has the means to live alone and both have no living relatives to rely on. Both are very aware of the somewhat shameful situation they find themselves in: college roommates still live together at 30, and Willem responds to this shame by claiming a place of his own within their apartment: “The second bedroom read, for example, was drawn in part from Willem's fear of being twenty-eight and still sharing a room with his college roommate” (Yanagihara 99). Willem recognizes the shame of being almost thirty and thus out of adolescence and of not having the means to live on his own. She relies on Jude to cover the other half of the rent, but by having a room of her own she can claim some semblance of independence. Career-wise, he has achieved a certain level of success, but this only comes after he fails to meet his deadline of quitting his job at a restaurant by his early thirties. It cannot cover theshameless waiter role because he recognizes it as a transition, a resting point after college and before finding success as an actor. In the public eye, none of his work can be seen as very impressive, perhaps partly due to the extent to which he is dependent on others for his income; he must receive a tip to supplement his pay as a waiter and must attract audiences to his performances and public image to achieve fame. Willem and Jude both work hard to achieve their goal of independence, driven by society's expectations of what an adult should be. In The Days of Abandonment, however, the protagonist begins the novel married with two children, in his mid-twenties. partnership. Suddenly, her husband leaves her for a younger woman, and she finds herself clinging to the remnants of the life that was taken from her and dealing with her new, unwanted independence. “From now on it would be like this, the responsibilities that had belonged to both of us would now be mine alone” (Ferrante 20). Olga expects to be helped with housework: paying bills, taking care of children, cooking, cleaning. Even in the tasks she carried out alone she did so with the knowledge that Mario was there to ask for help if she needed it. Independence is something distant for her, and returning to it is jarring. She's functioned as half a couple for two decades, and suddenly losing that status means making her reconsider her identity, something she hasn't had to do since she was in her twenties. Redefining herself is infinitely more difficult than running a household, and therefore takes up much of her time. Olga had no expectations of a broken marriage, and because she married Mario straight out of college, she grew up with him by her side. Her independence is a great weakness not because of any particular flaw or lack of skill on her part, but because she has never had to exist as an adult without Mario by her side. His self-doubts are paralyzing at this stage of the novel, and when he recognizes that he is spiraling, he fights to stop it. “If I expose myself, I will fight with myself” (Ferrante 58). Because of her obsession with her husband and everything he is doing with his new girlfriend, Olga pushes away everyone she could confide in and finds herself alone with her children. Here its independence can only be negative. She's alone and didn't choose to be, and she can't bear the sudden weight of introspection she's forced into when her husband declares she's no longer good enough. Her descent is painfully slow and she slips deeper into depression while still having two young children who depend on her. There is a pervasive stigma against single motherhood, both sexist and often racist at its core, and here Olga follows the worst aspects of the stereotype as she is unable to get back on her feet on her own, let alone be stable enough financially or emotionally to support his children. Of course, independence has advantages. You must be able to earn a living, pay for a place to live, see a doctor if ill, and interact with others as needed to ensure you can function within your society. Furthermore, relationships can put a strain on those in them, as they are always a compromise between something or the other. Whether giving or receiving love, time, or trust, small sacrifices are constantly made to maintain a functional relationship. Elena, the young narrator of My Brilliant Friend, finds it complicated and sometimes uncomfortable to manage her friendship with the girl she admires. When Lila drops her favorite doll down a drain, Elena feels “violent pain, but I had the feeling that the pain of fightingwith her he would have been even stronger. It was as if I were strangled by two agonies, one that had already happened, the loss of a doll, and one possible, the loss of Lila” (Ferrante 54). Here is a great example of the concessions that friendship can require. Two young girls engage in a strange competition, emotionally taking shots at each other as a means of demonstrating their dominance. The power struggle taking place here hardly seems healthy, and it may well not be. However, Elena gains self-confidence through their friendship and grows to see herself on a similar level to Lila, a girl she once put on a pedestal. Jude also feels uncomfortable because of the constant back and forth between friends, even though for him the most painful aspect of friendship is not cruelty but talking about oneself. For Jude «friendship was a series of exchanges: of affection, of time, sometimes of money, always of information. […] He had nothing to give them, he had nothing to offer” (Yanagihara 111). The strength one draws from friendship is weakened here as Jude emphasizes how much one must give to maintain that relationship. For an extremely private person like him, revealing information is not a fair exchange but an admission of vulnerability and, in his eyes, guilt for his previous actions. He's not simply reluctant to share, he's terrified of it, and it's not particularly surprising that it takes him decades before he feels comfortable telling anyone what happened to him. Relying on another is considerably more dangerous than struggling to exist alone. , even though he lives with a disability that leaves him paralyzed by nerve pain on a daily basis. Opening up to another means allowing someone to see exactly what made them (how they feel) despicable, with both physical and psychological scars. Romantic relationships are equally scarring, as made evident in Days of Abandonment. Olga shares her childhood memory of a situation similar to hers, where a “man left home for the love of a woman from Pescara and no one saw him again. Every night, from this moment on, our neighbor cried […] a kind of desperate sobs that broke through the walls like a battering ram” (Ferrante 15). When this man abandons his wife, she is left behind a broken thing. She relies too much on him and the support he has provided her, and without him she is unable to move forward - for this she is called the poor thing, poor woman, and is pitied by the community around her. There is a marked difference between pity and support here. Her husband is not seen negatively, rather she is the one who clings to a broken relationship, who becomes pathetic and incapable of taking care of herself. Here the shame of the inability to be independent is evident. Olga's primary memories of women become the sound of her crying and her horrible appearance as she falls apart in her husband's absence. However, the difficulties of relationships do not make them any less worth pursuing. Through the eyes of a biased and involved narrator, you will always feel the pain of a cheating spouse and the oh-so-sharp betrayal of a friend, because those negative emotions are necessary to cause conflict and move the plot forward. be made for Mario, Olga's husband: we only see him through his eyes as he pursues an almost-child (which is off-putting enough in itself), but we have no idea of ​​the great unhappiness in the marriage beyond what she tells us . Jude is so reluctant to connect with people because of his distorted self-image, and as the audience learns that he's nothing like the horrible person he claims to be, the strong emotions he feels can't help but be transferred to.