The phenomenon of love in W. S. Maugham’s short story “The pool” and J. S. Foer’s novel Extremely loud and incredibly close

This article delves into the portrayal of love in William Somerset Maugham’s short story “The Pool” (1921) and Jonathan Safran Foer’s novel Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (2005). Drawing on ancient interpretations of love found in Plato’s dialogue “The Symposium”, as well as the perspectives of classical thinkers such as Friedrich Nietzsche, Arthur Schopenhauer, and Max Scheler, the authors explore love as a profound human value and a means of understanding the world. This concept, rooted in medieval thought, is further developed in Nietzsche’s philosophy and later becomes a central tenet in Scheler’s theory of cognition. Building on these ideas about love, the authors closely examine the behavior of the characters in the aforementioned works to investigate how the authors portray people experiencing love, the evolution of relationships between loving individuals, and the actions that those in love are capable of.