Love in Salvage the Bones

BLOG 2: Chapter 1 of Salvage the Bones is full of various kinds of love—love for China, China’s love for her puppies, familial love, and the relationship between Esch and Manny. What is Ward trying to tell us about the power of love in this first chapter?

With the many different types of love presented, what I believe Ward is trying to do is simply provide us with a realistic human landscape. Love is at the root of everything we as humans do, love of others, love of self, love of objects. Presenting love as something multifaceted with different incarnations is then, realistically portraying the human condition. The romantic love Esch may or may not feel for Manny comes first for me because of the lesson it implies; Esch is learning about romance, she is just beginning to feel her way around the world in a romantic way and she finds Manny attractive. That's a very normal very common thing in youth. China on the other hand offers an example of the opposite; the unlearned love, the intrinsic instinctive sort that lives inside all living things for their offspring. It does not need to be taught or learned. Protection comes hand in hand with this kind of love but China literally being a dog rather than a human person adds another level to this specific example - it speaks to the primeval animalistic nature intrinsic in this kind of love - the kind of love Mama felt as she squatted and pushed out Junior while, as a long time mother, she had to have know the pain she felt was not normal - that the pain might mean the end of her. Ward is then, through all these examples, trying to make us understand that, to borrow the phrase, love is a many feathered thing. It is different in all it's incarnations but at once the same. It's the root of all things.