I Ll Give You The Sun Theme Essay

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In Jandy Nelson I’ll Give You The Sun the author employs many motifs throughout the novel to write about her not so typical california beach town. Art is used as a form of self expression, but in this story the characters use art to describe themselves and the objects around them. Using painters and sculptors to assimilate with, the characters aren’t so normal to everyone else in their town. Looking at this novel with a lense of both queer and psychoanalytic literary theory, this story fits the coloquials of homosexuality and highlights the development of the characters psyche. Jandy Nelson uses the motif of art to demonstrate that self expression is most important to be true to oneself because Jude and Noah can 't physically display their emotions so they show them through art. A recurring motif in queer theory has a binary opposite. The twins, Jude and Noah, have polar opposites of each other; as Noah is gay Jude is straight. They both have different problems that coincide with each other, they both have a cathex that changed …show more content…

With the psychoanalysis of the story, the twins are the two egos while the parents and third party characters serve as archetypes that influence the twins. The two grow slowly apart as their put against each other with one sided stories that can’t seem to fit together. The progression of impairing to sabotage, the twins fight for their chance at attention and redemption that seems unachievable. Using queer literary theory, the story shows that the psychosexual developments of the twins are drastically different and grow in totally different ways. In I’ll Give You The Sun by Jandy Nelson the author uses motifs and themes of guilt and dread in art to describe the emotions of characters that seem unattainable because of the envy the twins have for each other is so great that they break their