Love By Thomas Hardy Analysis

The passage opens with the narrator returning to his home country of Istanbul after being gone for twelve years. The narrator calls these twelve years an ‘exile’ from his country when, in reality, he had left to make something of himself by working as a mail man and as a tax collector in the mountains of Persia and as a secretary in the service of pashas from the east.

The themes of the passage are those of nostalgia and forgetfulness. The theme of nostalgia is evident and is brought out in the second paragraph of the passage as the narrator reminisces about where he was and he was doing during his twelve-year gap away from Istanbul. The theme of forgetfulness is brought out in the lines, ”Love, however, was a distant and forgotten thing,

In the opening line of the passage, the author makes use of simile in the line, “I entered Istanbul like a sleepwalker.” This shows the reader that the narrator thinks that he is asleep and dreaming that he is returning to his home after all those years away. This tells the reader that the narrator does not remember the country and place where he was born and brought up. In the following line, “it was death that drew me back to the city where I’d been and raised.” This shows to the reader that the only reason that the narrator returned home was due to the death of a loved one or friend whom he cared about deeply and intimately. This creates a sad and gloomy mood as the tone of the narrator is very direct and

This makes the readers feel as if something dark and dangerous occurred there, something so evil that the aftermath still resonates throughout the city. In the second paragraph, the author brings to light the fact that the narrator’s childhood love was his own cousin. This proves that during the aforementioned time period, incest was still prevalent and was an acceptable thing. On finding out this fact, the readers feel slight disgust against the narrator as they question how one could fall intimately in love with their own