In recent years, the age of maturity in Western cultures has been increasingly raised as more education becomes necessary to pursue employment opportunities. Crisis economies increasingly force children to depend on their parents after graduation. Despite the practical need to take a few extra years to become fully independent, the current generation entering the workforce is being criticized for taking too long to support themselves. This stigma is more deeply rooted in our self-centered culture and the lure of individual success. To be independent is to be admirable, to be able to take care of yourself. Addiction is almost universally looked down upon: even though romantic relationships are encouraged, individuals are still expected to have clear goals and identity outside of their partner. These social patterns are reflected in modern literature. In Hanya Yanagihara's A Little Life and Elena Ferrante's The Days of Abandonment and My Brilliant Friend, the protagonists struggle to balance the desire to be independent and self-sufficient with the fulfillment that relationships can provide. For everyone, dependence on others becomes a struggle to maintain their boundaries and behave as they have become accustomed to. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on “Why Violent Video Games Should Not Be Banned”?Get the original essay Jude, the protagonist of A Little Life, is an incredibly private man who suffered horrific abuse throughout his childhood and adolescence and therefore is incredibly reluctant to trust. His three closest friends are his college roommates, who quickly learn that to be close to Jude “You let things go that your instincts told you not to do, you spotted the limits of your suspicions. You understood that the proof of your friendship lay in keeping your distance. (Yanagihara 84). Jude refuses to comply with any attempt to learn more about his traumatic childhood and adolescence, because to do so would be to allow someone else to carry the weight of what he experienced. Likewise, he refuses to talk about his self-harm, both because the mechanism is essential to its functioning and also because he is ashamed of it and the vulnerability it shows. Here his need to be solitary harms him, as he rejects the opportunity to develop closer relationships in order to maintain the control he believes he has over the small sphere in which he operates. His childhood was so unstable that everything he manages to exert power over is incredibly precious: his cuts, his routine, and the secrets he shares. He is closest to Willem, with whom he moves in after leaving college, as neither can afford to live on their own and both have no living relatives to rely on. Both are very aware of the somewhat shameful situation they occupy: college roommates who still live together at 30, and Willem responds to this shame by claiming a place of his own in their apartment: “The second bedroom, for example, was constructed 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 in his thirties and so far out of adolescence and not having the means to live on his own. He relies on Jude to cover the other half of the rent, but by having his own room he can claim some semblance of independence. Professionally, he achieved asome degree of success, but that only comes after he misses his own deadline to quit his restaurant job at thirty. He cannot take the job of waiter without shame because he recognizes it as a transition, a resting point after college and before succeeding as an actor. In the public eye, none of his jobs can be considered very impressive, perhaps in part because of the extent to which he depends on others for his income; he must be tipped to supplement his waiter's salary and must please the audience in his performances and public image in order to make his way to fame. Both Willem and Jude work hard to achieve their goal of independence, driven by society's expectations of what an adult should be. In Days of Abandonment, however, the protagonist begins the novel married with two children, one half aged twenty. partnership. Abruptly, her husband leaves her for a younger woman, and she must pick up the remnants of the life that was taken from her and deal with her new, unwanted independence. “From now on it would be like this, the responsibilities that belonged to both of us would now be mine alone” (Ferrante 20). Olga expects help with household chores: paying bills, looking after the children, cooking, cleaning. Even for the tasks she did alone, she did so knowing that Mario was there to ask for help if she needed it. Independence is something distant for her and returning to it is shocking. She has been functioning as one half of a couple for two decades, and to suddenly lose this status is to make her reconsider her identity, something she has not had to do since her twenties. Redefining yourself is infinitely more difficult than running a house and therefore takes up a lot of your time. Olga didn't expect a shortened marriage, and because she married Mario right out of college, she grew up with him by her side. Her independence is a great weakness, not because of any particular lack or lack of skill on her part, but because she never had to exist as an adult without Mario by her side. Her self-doubt is crippling at this point in the novel, and as she recognizes herself in a spiral, she struggles to stop it. “If I expose myself to myself, I will fight” (Ferrante 58). Because of her obsession with her husband and everything he has to do with his new girlfriend, Olga chases away anyone she could confide in and finds herself alone with her children. Here, its independence can only be negative. She is alone and did not choose to be, and cannot bear the sudden weight of introspection into which she finds herself plunged when her husband declares that she is no longer good enough. Her descent is painfully slow and she sinks deeper and deeper into depression while still having two young children dependent on her. There is a pervasive stigma against single motherhood that is both sexist and often racist at its core, and Olga here follows the worst aspects of the stereotype as she is unable to get back on her feet, much less be financially or emotionally stable enough to meet his needs. his children. Of course, there are benefits to independence. One must be able to earn a living, afford housing, see a doctor when ill, and interact with others when necessary to ensure that one can function within one's society. Additionally, relationships can take a toll on those in them because they are always a compromise between something or the other. Whether it's giving or receiving love, time or trust, small sacrificesare constantly agreed to in order to maintain a functional relationship. Elena, the young narrator of My Brilliant Friend, finds it complicated and sometimes uncomfortable to form a friendship with the girl she admires. When Lila drops her favorite doll into the sewer, Elena feels "a violent pain, but I felt that the pain of arguing with her would be even greater." It was as if I were being strangled by two anxieties, one already present, the loss of a doll, and the other possible, the loss of Lila” (Ferrante 54). This is a great example of the give and take that friendship can require. Two young girls engage in a strange competition, throwing emotional punches at each other to display their dominance. The power struggle going on here hardly seems healthy, and it very well might not be. However, Elena gains confidence through their friendship and sees herself on a similar level to Lila, a girl she once placed on a pedestal. Jude is equally uncomfortable with the exchanges between friends, even though for him the most painful aspect of friendship is not the cruelty but the talking about himself. For Jude, “friendship was a series of exchanges: of affections, of time, sometimes of money, always of information. [...] He had nothing to give them, he had nothing to offer” (Yanagihara 111). The strength one derives from friendship is undermined here, as Jude emphasizes how much one must give to maintain this relationship. For an intensely watched person like him, giving information is not a fair trade but an admission of vulnerability and, in his eyes, guilt for his previous actions. He's not just reluctant to share, he's terrified to share, and it's not particularly surprising that it takes him decades to feel comfortable telling anyone that happened to him. Relying on others is considerably more dangerous than struggling to exist on your own. , even though he lives with a disability that leaves him paralyzed daily by nerve pain. Opening up to others means allowing someone to see exactly what has made them (as they feel) despicable, with scars both physical and psychological. Romantic relationships are just as healing, as The Days of Abandonment shows. Olga shares a memory from her childhood of a situation similar to hers, where “a man left home for love of a woman in Pescara and no one saw him again. Every night, from that moment on, our neighbor cried [...] a sort of desperate sobbing that went through the walls like a battering ram” (Ferrante 15). When this man abandons his wife, she is left behind as a broken thing. She relies too much on him and the support he gives her, and without him she cannot continue - she is called the poverella, the poor woman, and she is pitied by the community who surrounds it. There is a marked difference here between pity and support. Her husband is not viewed negatively, rather it is her, the one clinging to a crumbling relationship, becoming pathetic and incapable of taking care of herself. Here the shame of an inability to be independent is apparent. Olga's main memories of women become the sound of her crying and her horrible appearance as she breaks down in her husband's absence. However, the trials of relationships don't make them any less interesting to pursue. Through the eyes of a biased and invested narrator, we will always feel the pain of an unfaithful spouse and the ever-acute betrayal of a friend, because these negative emotions are necessary to provoke conflict and move the plot forward. be made for Mario, Olga's husband - we only see him through his eyes as he chases a nearby child (which is bad enough.