Journey into a Dark Heart | Themes

Journey into a Dark Heart Themes

Love

In the introductory note to Tales of the Night, Høeg says: "These eight stories are linked by a date and a motif. All of them have to do with love. Love and its conditions on the night of March 19, 1929." Without this guiding motif, readers might have trouble picking out the theme of love in "Journey into a Dark Heart," since the story does not deal with love in the traditional, romantic sense. Instead, Høeg's exploration of love manifests itself in the characters' tales about their life passions. For David, this passion is mathematics, a vocation to which he is deeply devoted. As the narrator says, David "became a mathematician out of a deep, burning passion for that crystal-clear, purifying algebraic science from which all earthly uncertainty has been distilled." Joseph K.'s passion is for writing and exploration. He notes: "As a boy I used to look at maps,...
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