Love

Romantic attraction is a central element of the story’s narrative and themes, as the story seeks to both celebrate and satirize the unpredictability of romance. The opening paragraphs of the story assert that this unpredictability is most pronounced in the springtime, specifically the month of May. The narration asserts that romantic attraction is often sudden and irrational, and that love sometimes brings humans closer to a state of nature or animalistic tendency: “In May nature holds up at us a chiding finger, bidding us remember that we are not gods, but overconceited members of her own great family. She reminds us that we are brothers to the chowder-doomed clam and the donkey; lineal scions of the pansy and the chimpanzee, and but cousins-german to the cooing doves” (110). The story does not seem to assert that love and romance are undesirable, but that they do often...