论《伤心咖啡馆之歌》中多角爱情关系所诠释的爱的绝望(英文)

Cousin Lymon had a very peculiar accomplishment, which he used whenever he wished to ingratiate himself with someone. He would stand very still, and with just a little concentration; he could wiggle his large pale ears with marvelous quickness and ease. This trick he always used when he wanted to get something special out of Miss Amelia, and to her it was irresistible. Now as he stood there the hunchback’s ears were wiggling furiously on his head, but it was not Miss Amelia at whom he was looking this time. The hunchback was smiling at Marvin Macy. [2]

Lymon’s behavior of love is a clown. Every minute he wants to follow Macy; he doesn’t accompany Amelia as before, but at the same time, he is still enjoying the comfortable life to get out of Amelia. He invites Macy to live with him in Amelia’ house, never considers about the fact that Amelia hates Macy. What is more, on that evening of the fight, he helped Marvin Macy to defeat Amelia. To some sense, Marvin Macy should thanks Lymon for his help, but the latter never earn gratitude or love.
In The Ballad of Sad Café, heroines are eager to communicate meaningfully with the beloved, but unfortunately they all fail. The combination of love and loneliness in the spiritual wasteland results from their failure of communication. The absurd polyhedrosis love relationship of the three characters gives greater depth of the theme of this novella: modern people, even if they make great efforts to seek love, still can not be freed from spiritual isolation. "The absurdity and incompetence of love is the hot topic of Western literature, and it reflects people’s survival and alienation in the spiritual and moral wasteland.”[10] The ambiguity and uncertainty of love makes the beloved hate even scare the lover. The lack of self-awareness makes both the lover and the beloved fragile and weak in psychology; they are easy to be hurt, even betrayed and deceited. Thus in this novella, love becomes self-driven power to make him or her more lonely. The terrible destructive power of love is far beyond its function of cure spiritual isolation.

Conclusion 
This paper analyzes one of the themes of The Ballad of Sad Café—love desperation from the aspect of the polyhedrosis love relationship of the three characters: Miss Amelia, Marvin Macy, and Cousin Lymon. Carson McCullers uses grotesque writing technique to vividly describe a doomed and tragic love story about physically disabled and psychologically distorted southern citizens. While this paper puts its emphasis on why the three characters fall in the triangle love and how the theme of love desperation concretely explains loneliness and alienation in the modern society. The following analyses are served for expressing love desperation. Through the analysis of polyherosis love relationship step by step, it can be known that the social condition of southern America in the 19th century and the sick personalities of the three heroines lead to their tragic love. Their loneliness and separation results form their incompetent love and twisted love. The three characters in this novella all stand at the position of both the lover and the beloved, however, in the process of seeking of love, they all fail because of the lack of returning of love from the beloved and the failure of spiritual communication. People can not break away from the imprisonment of loneliness when the release of love is failed. If the spirit is distorted, it will reveal the destructive strength of love and make people lonely more and more.