Love Story as a Potential Grief Story. (The conflict of ideality and reality in prose thematising the loss of a partner)
The study focuses on the reception of a work of literature communicating the subject of death. Thematically related texts are subjected to interpretative probes revolving around the topic of the loss of a partner. The author of this study focuses on the conception of the writer’s creation, along with the ideological parameters of ideal and real [Miko 1989] that are shifting into a tensional–detensional relation in the depicted topic. The author of the study captures the unfolding of the protagonist’s psychic state in interpretative observations and clarifies the supporting system aiding the protagonist in overcoming the initial feelings of desolation, anxiety and void, among others. Death as a phenomenon is examined in the texts of contemporary British writers Julian Barnes [Levels of Life 2014] and Clive Staples Lewis [A Grief Observed 2012]. Both writers approached the topic from various vantage points such as the writer’s effort in translating a new experience into a work of literature; limitations and capability of language in conveying a life-changing event, about a pursuit for the appropriate metaphor and others. This study juxtaposes current texts with selected mythological stories that exhibited similarities in the topic and motivic composition.