The Story of Vipers Tangle - Essay Example

Analyzing Vipers’ Tangle
Introduction
He decided to leave a written record of his life so that someday his family might know about his hidden appreciation of relations (Mauriac, 1933). This paper will attempt to integrate Lewis’s theories of love with the story named Vipers’ Tangle and focus on finding out the application of these theories at various stages of the story.

Lewis identified two important forms of love people experience during their life span. These are Gift and Need Loves (Lewis, 1960); respectively, the first form of love drives an individual to work in order to provide a safe future to his or her family, and the second one compels a person to share his or her worries with the close ones. However, these two loves should keep moving parallel to each other and co-exist in harmony because if an individual shows only need-based love, this will make the family consider him or her as apathetic and unwilling to struggle for his family’s better future. On the other hand, if a person keeps on earning millions while devoting virtually no time to his or her family, the family will consider a person greedy, mean, and indifferent.

The relationship between Louis and his son Hubert took a series of interesting turns during Louis’s life. Louis spent an active life while demonstrating Gift Love for his family. In parallel, Hubert showed love filled with selfishness for his father because Louis fulfilled Hubert’s basic necessities of life at that time. However, Hubert and Louis’s ability to love changed when Hubert started to demonstrate the gift of love in order to help his father to alleviate his last days. At the same time, Louis unsuccessfully tried to give Need Love to his son, but it was too late.

Nevertheless, Hubert and Louis’s tendency to care for each other could not play a significant role in bridging the gap between them. So these men lived apart due to their ego, which hindered both of them from accepting their mistakes of the past (Mauriac, 1933). In the light of this story, it is important to appreciate the supportive role of the family in times of difficulty because the warmth of the family is an effective stress lifter. However, Louis lived away from the love of his family and had to face a great deal of stress while fulfilling his professional obligations (Rupert et al., 2012). As a result, his life satisfaction dropped significantly, which made him become agitated. Due to these reasons, his loneliness grew intense in the last years of his life.

In Lewis’s view, Louis kept demonstrating Gift Love towards his family members all his life, which resulted in his painful loneliness. However, Louis attempted to show his Need for Love for his family, but it proved ineffective. In general, both characters had some changes in the kinds of love that they showed; each one of them started with either Need Love or Gift Love and ended up with the other. At first, Louis only showed Gift Love to Hubert, and this is why he was considered to mean, for he was not close to his family. However, after he had become old, Hubert was compelled to provide for him, which is a change from Need Love to Gift Love, whereas Louis, even though it was too late, started giving his son Need Love as he could no longer offer Gift Love.

Conclusion
Vipers Tangle’s theme is that humans are fundamentally mortals; they live in this world for a very short period, but humans do not tend to realize the importance of relatives until they lose them (Lewis, 1961).