Love as seen through desire in the stories of Luis Katigbak's short story collection, Happy endings

• Main Author: Mateo, Maria Anisette C.
• Format: text
• Published: Animo Repository 2016
• Subjects: Desire in literature; Love in literature
• Online Access: https://animorepository.dlsu.edu.ph/etd_bachelors/2810
• Institution: De La Salle University

In the Philippines, love stories are seen in every type and form of art and media. Despite this, minimal studies have been done in analyzing the romantic relationships in contemporary texts. It is important that these depicted relationships be studied to better understand the dynamics of relationships in the late 1990's until the 21st century. The importance of the study also lies in its contribution to the lack of studies in contemporary Philippine texts. This study explores the idea of desire in the six love stories found in Louis Katigbak's Happy endings with the help of Freud and Lacan's psychoanalytical theories revolving around one's past, the Oedipus complex, and one's absence. The theories borrowed will be based on Catherine Belsey's own readings in her book Desire: love stories in Western cultures and Julia Kristeva's readings. The study aims to answer how desire was played out in in the relationship of the couple. How different is the desire of one form of love from another form of love? How does the relation of the characters' past affect their current love affair? Did the closure satisfy the desire in the relationship or did it further intensify it? The forms of love expressed by the stories will first be identified. Then, the indictions of desire in each story will be sought out then related to the concepts given by the said theorists. Belsey emphasized the concept of desire with the idea of having no perfectly happy endings. This concept will be used to study this particular sense of closure to explore the irony of the collection's title being Happy endings. "