Does Love Actually Conquer All Analysis

Does Love Actually Conquer All? – Culminating Literary Essay: Eleanor & Park
Throughout the years, love has been portrayed as the greatest force of all, the be­all­end­all solution to any person’s problems in all types of media: film, television, books, and many more. However, in the novel Eleanor & Park by Rainbow Rowell, it is shown that this is not always true. The novel takes place in 1980’s suburban Omaha, Nebraska. Eleanor is a girl who has just moved to town, and lives in an impoverished and abusive household, and
Park is a boy who feels that he does not fit in with everyone else, especially with his Korean ethnicity in a place where everyone is white. Although the two protagonists manage to find love together despite their circumstances, it is clear from their tragic

This can be seen when Eleanor is thinking about her gratefulness towards Park for everything he’s done for her: “You saved my life, she tried to tell him. Not forever, not for good. Probably just temporarily. But you saved my life, and now I’m yours.” (310). This is an example of something that she never explicitly communicates to Park, and is something the reader knows only because of Rowell’s choice of limited omniscient as the point of view. Knowing the characters’ innermost thoughts emphasizes their love for each other, and magnifies the effect it has on both the characters and the reader. This is demonstrated by Park’s thoughts during one of his last kisses with
Eleanor: “The kiss had to last Park forever. It had to get him home. He needed to remember it when he woke up in the middle of the night.” (302). Park’s musings disclose how emotional he is about Eleanor, who he implies is the love of his life here, and increases the impact of their love on the reader, as it shows how deeply devoted they are to each other. By intensifying the impact of their relationship, it makes their eventual break up more hard­hitting than it