Comparison Of Dysfunctional Desire In Wuthering Heights And Paper Towns

Dysfunctional Desire

Human kind is often known to follow their wants and obtain what they want, sometimes, even when they know the things are unattainable. In the novel Wuthering Heights and Paper Towns, both Emily Bronte and John Green develop the characters in such a way, where they want something that even they know is unattainable but still try for it anyway, the sense of desire can often motivate people to push towards breaking the barriers of society.

The image of a person in often merely a reflection of what we want to see in them, but in reality, that perception is often different from how they actually are. In both Wuthering Heights and Paper Towns, both protagonists are going after something which they think they know, but

Something which even they know they cant have. Catherine seems so close to Heathcliff but he knows he cant have her because of her marriage with Edgar "I 've no more business to marry Edgar Linton than I have to be in heaven; and if the wicked man in there had not brought Heathcliff so low, I shouldn 't have thought of it. It would degrade me to marry Heathcliff now."(Bronte 99), Heathcliffe was well aware of his social class at the time but is still not hindered from making efforts to achieve her love.. In Paper Towns, Quentin knew that Margo was beyond his reach, yet he still went after her and tried to get close to her. When he finally did, he found out that she loved him too, but even she ended up disappearing. “Margo Roth Spiegelman, whose six syllable name was often spoken in its entirety with a kind of quiet reverence. Margo Roth Spiegelman, whose stories of epic adventures would blow through school like a summer storm: an old guy living in a broken-down house in Hot Coffee, Mississippi, taught Margo how to play the guitar. Margo Roth Spiegelman, who spent three days traveling with the circus—they thought she had potential on the trapeze. Margo Roth Spiegelman, who drank a cup of herbal tea with the Millionaires backstage after a concert

Both Quentin and Heathcliff face barriers in the form of love, and are led to overcoming the fact that desires are the main reason behind why things happen, desire is the main motivator of life. With both protagonists, clinging to the fact that how they view a person is who a person really is, the desire doesn’t fade away, the infatuation persists longer and longer because it tricks the person that they are learning something new about the other person. This perception is what leads people to disregard the barriers and limitations set in place by society, however, society does not carry the universal accepted term of “the outside world,” rather, society means what is accepted, our own inhibitors which trigger a negative impulse and stray people from situations that would normally end up with destructive