The Delirium of Love
“Love; a single word, a wispy thing, a word no bigger or longer than an edge. That’s what it is; an edge: a razor. It draws up through the center of your life, cutting everything in two. Before and after. The rest of the world falls away at either side” (Oliver 25). Delirium, by Lauren Oliver, is a book about a world without love. Lena believes getting cured from love will make her life better and much safer until she meets Alex. They have to find a way to be with each other without getting caught. This is a good book to read because of it’s real life connection to love and it’s message that people should see that what seems good is not always good. To begin, Delirium has connections to feelings that can be addictive,
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On page 90 Oliver states, “We’ll be adults- cured, tagged, and labeled and paired and identified and neatly on our life path, perfectly round marbled set to roll down even, well defined slopes.” This quotation proves that everyone believes what they have been told. They think that their lives will be perfect just because people say they will. The novel states, “All the buildings and people looking so dazed and the smells and the closeness of everything and the rules- rules everywhere you turned, rules and walls, rules and walls. I feel like I wasn’t used to it. I felt like I was in a cage. We are all in a bordered cage” (Oliver 228). This evidence proves that Lena realizes she has been believing what everyone told her instead of seeing what's really in front of her. She is trapped in a world of lies and nothing is as perfect as it once seemed. In the novel Mother states, “You’ll have your cure on Sunday first thing in the morning. After that, we hope, you’ll be okay”(Oliver 409). And, “One thing is for certain: I won't have the procedure tomorrow, I’d rather die” (Oliver 422). In the end, this shows that the mother is still believing the lies that she has been told. Lena, however, sees through the lies and knows the procedure is worse than people