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Essay on True Meaning of Love Revealed in Snow Falling on Cedars

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True Meaning of Love Revealed in Snow Falling on Cedars

David Guterson's novel, Snow Falling on Cedars, is one that covers a number of important aspects in life, including some controversial topics like racism and the Japanese internment during America's involvement in the Second World War. It speaks to this reader on a more immediate and personal level, however, through the playing out of Ishmael and Hatsue's relationship-one which Hatsue seems to be able to walk away from, but which shapes the way Ishmael tries to "live" his life because he cannot let go of the past, or a future that is not, and was not meant to be.

Ishmael never recovers from the severance of his romantic relationship with Hatsue because of the …show more content…

Upon returning from the war, Ishmael moved to Seattle and slept with three different women whom he did not love, and whom he kept around only because he knew "when asked them to walk out of his life he would be even lonelier than he'd been before..." (355). And when he returned to San Piedro Island he was unable to stay away from Hatsue and finds a moment to share with her what his love, when not reciprocated-when it is not possible for it to be reciprocated-is like: "I'm like a dying person. I haven't been happy for single moment since the day you left... It's like carrying a weight around in my gut, a ball of lead or something... Sometimes I think I'm going to go crazy, end up in the hospital in Bellingham. I'm crazy, I don't sleep... It never leaves me along, this feeling. Sometimes I don't think I can stand it. I tell myself this can't go on, but goes on anyway. There isn't anything I can do" (333).

Time. To Hatsue, time was all that was required. Because she did not, could not understand-because no one not in Ishmael's position could possibly have understood. Hatsue was still Ishmael's friend and cared deeply for how he felt, but her position was so different from his that she had nothing to say. She had no choice in words, though she may have wanted to say something, because she made the choice at Manzanar that she did not love him, and to marry Kabuo as if to seal her decision. It was this sealed decision that gave her the

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