Nicholas Sparks’ Dear John and Love as Unworthy of Pursuit

In Dear John, Nicholas Sparks introduces us to a world of un-pursued love, in which the virtues of affection are subjugated to what Sparks presents as higher ones, though he does not define them. For Sparks, unlike his predecessors, love is not worthy of human pursuit, but is best waited upon. Accordingly, Sparks’ John Tyree represents a confused legacy of masculinity that is antithetical to the classical mold in which male protagonists have been shaped. Indeed, we see through nineteenth-century female writer, Emily Bronte’, and her literary labors an unbridled passion to which Sparks and his protagonist cannot hope to compare. In so deviating from love as a pursuit, Sparks shows us that love itself knows many bounds, especially when held by emasculated men.

What is truly extraordinary about the manner in which Sparks proposes that his protagonist hold his love in abeyance is how it compares to the development of Bronte’s protagonist in Wuthering Heights, in addition to the approach taken by Bronte in framing her novel. In Wuthering Heights, Bronte’s Heathcliff is picked up off the street as a boy, a shell of a human, with barely enough energy to survive his journey to his newfound caretakers. He is presented as a kind of feral child, whose passions cannot be tamed. In his pursuit of Catherine, Heathcliff retains this same unconquerable desire, pursuing Catherine with an unquenchable thirst (Eagleton 36). In this sense, Heathcliff’s passion and the context through which it has been formed runs immediately counter to that of Sparks’ protagonist, John Tyree. John is raised by an Asperberger’s Syndrome-afflicted father, as a result of which his social skills are relatively underdeveloped. Heathcliff too is said to speak in “gibberish,” but this trait comes to further the indomitable nature of his passion for and pursuit of Catherine, whereas John’s manner of speaking leaves him content to merely “sit on a hillside,” awaiting the return of his love (Sparks, Prologue 1).

John Tyree spends much of Sparks’ novel “waiting in vain” for a love that will never be. Indeed, we find John in reverie for much of the novel, engaged in a kind of masochistic re-imagination of how his life with Savannah might have been or may yet be. Indeed, Tyree acknowledges early on that he is “a walking cliché,” thereby further distancing the character from Heathcliff’s fictional ancestry in that Bronte’s male protagonist does not succumb to external definition, choosing instead to pursue Catherine’s love, which itself is symbolic of the personal ideal to which he aspires (Sparks 5). In evaluating the manner in which Heathcliff has been depicted through modern stage and cinema, Hila Shachar speaks to the manner in which Sparks’ protagonist has been emasculated, thereby removing from Dear John any semblance of a world where love is worth its pursuit: “Heathcliff’s characterization has primarily been fashioned in response to changes in the roles of women through a politics of transcendence in which his identity is turned into an existentialist drama” (Shachar 128). The character of Savannah, the ostensible object of Tyree’s affections, seems designed to this effect.

From the moment the reader encounters Savannah, she is the archetypal modern woman: working for Habitat for Humanity, pursuing both the laborious and the altruistic. Indeed, her dalliance with John itself somehow seems altruistic in nature and, of course, the manner in which she offers her affections is prototypically selfless, agreeing to wed a dying man for the benefit of his child. It is thus fitting that John’s foremost expression of purported love is his gift to Savannah that ensures the comfort of her soon-to-be-deceased husband in his dying days. As such, John alienates his own love in the altruistic tendencies he perceives in Savannah. Her identity and her desires become a vehicle by which John feels he can further his love. It is as though Sparks is suggesting that the purest form of love amounts to nothing more than an ignorance of self and wholesale deference to the modern woman’s each and every proclivity.

In Bronte’s Heathcliff, however, we see a self-alienation of love not within its object’s every whim and fancy, but within its heart itself. Heathcliff so loves Catherine that he comes to express this love through the only mechanism available to him; namely, revenge on those who made it impossible for him to express it in its truest form. Even as he should be consoling her, Heathcliff condemns his beloved for “betray[ing] her own heart,” willing to banish her into the depths of eternal damnation, if only to know that her spirit walks the earth indefinitely, always to be with him (Bronte 118). Needless to say, Heathcliff’s love is for him worth much more than a love that Tyree expresses through simple accommodation and unfounded patience.

In Nicholas Sparks’ Dean John, we witness a love that finds no expression in the real, destined to wait and accommodate in perpetuity. Sparks construction of his protagonist, John Tyree, runs counter to the Victorian ideal of masculinity and its affections, as illustrated by and through Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights, in which Heathcliff refuses to compromise his affections for his beloved Cathy. Sparks vision of John Tyree betrays this literary tradition in subjugating the deepest expression of love to mere niceties and pleasantries. While this faux nobility becomes the driving force of Sparks novel, it is so far removed from the tradition to which he believes he belongs as to render his expression of it just as ineffectual as his protagonist’s love. For John Tyree, the lover is to alienate the whole of himself in the loved one, whereas for Heathcliff, the lover is to pursue love not merely for its self-edifying benefits, but for the sake of its own value; the same one Sparks purports to explicate in Dear John.

Works Cited

Bronte, Emily. Wuthering Heights. Yorkshire, UK: Dover Publications Inc., 1996. Print

Eagleton, Terry. Heathcliff and the Great Hunger: Studies in Irish Culture. London: Verso, 1995. Print.

Shachar, Hila. Cultural Afterlives and Screen Adaptations of Classic Literature: Wuthering Heights and Company. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012. Print

Sparks, Nicholas. Dear John. New York: Warner Books, 2006. Print.