Emotional Losses In Latin American Literature

“When you lose touch with your inner stillness, you lose touch with yourself. When you lose touch with yourself, you lose yourself in the world.” This quote by Eckhart Tolle shows how impactful the loss of peace can be to a person. Without their sanity, it is easy to identify these losses. Although this may not pertain to physical loss, emotional loss deals with more abstract losses such as self, hope, and reality. The effects of colonialism and war played a huge role in the negativity of people’s happiness, causing their hope to plummet. These losses are important aspects to the writing and literature to spread positivity and hope for the people. Latin American writing uses the theme of emotional losses, such as the loss of self, hope, and …show more content…
This connection relates to the reader because of the hardships going on in their country. In the poem “We Are Many” by Pablo Neruda, the narrator feels empty and hopeless due to a lack of self-confidence. The narrator’s lack of confidence is connected to the small sense of pride to their country. “Dazzling hero figures, always brimming with self-assurance. I die with envy of them … I am left in envy of the cowboys, left admiring even the horses” (346 Neruda). The narrator is envious of cowboys and horses for their bravery and freedom, which he lacks himself. Because of this, the narrator then begins to question his true self. “I never know just who I am, nor how many I am, nor who we will be being” (346 Neruda). Moreover, unhappiness or hopelessness results in other emotional losses as seen in the poem “Poet’s …show more content…
The character “[permits] himself a slowly growing interest in the plot” of the novel he had begun to read (363 Cortázar). “He tasted the almost perverse pleasure of disengaging himself line by line from the things around him, and at the same time feeling his read rest … beyond the great windows the air of afternoon danced under the oak trees in the park” (363 Cortázar). Cortázar uses “magical realism” in the story to show how the man in the story got lost in his mind and left the real world in which he was in. By using this genre and the theme of loss from reality, Cortázar furthermore shows the progression of the story in the character’s mind. “Letting himself be absorbed to the point where the images settled down and took on color and movement he was witness to the final encounter in the mountain cabin” (364 Cortázar). The man was so into the novel that his imagination went wild and his inspiration took him to the other world in the novel. Cortázar teaches the readers how losing themselves also leads to losing touch with the world, similarly to how the man in the story traveled within his