Summary of Literary Criticism- The Joy Luck Club - Essay Example

The Joy Luck Club The Joy Luck Club is a novel written by an American by the Amy Tan. The novel mainly focuses on how mothers and daughters relate. The whole novel consists of 16 stories, all of which focuses on this main theme of women and the relationship with their daughters. Amy Tan has used different themes to illustrate the relationship throughout the novel. The relationship illustrated in the novel is a reflection of what some daughters and mothers go through in the real world and the distant relationship they have between themselves.

One of the main themes expressed throughout the novel is failure of communication. Lack of communication causes a lot of pain between a mother and her daughter. For instance, Jing-Mei and Suyuan, her mother, have difficulties in communication and they misunderstand about the aspect of their traditions. As a result, they hardly communicate and thus keep issues to themselves. Unfortunately, lack of communication hides a lot of things that goes on in their lives, which they are not able to share in order to find a solution (Fong 122).

The Joy Luck Club is formed by Sayuan with an aim of uniting the mothers so that they can forget all the suffering they have been through. The club brings several mothers together and they are able to open up and tell each of their stories and what they have been through. There is a sign of relief as they do so. When problems are shared, they are half solved. The novel’s main aim is to present the reasons there is misunderstanding between mothers and their daughters, simply because of lack of proper communication.

Work CitedFong, Yem Siu. Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies 1990: 122. JSTOR Journals. Web. 10 Dec. 2014.