Narrative Term Papers - Friends and Lovers

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Friends and Lovers is a sexy, soulful story of love, deception, and friendship created in the modern-day Los Angeles. It is the story of the lives of four young African-Americans who are brought together through the love and the laughter, as well as the anguish and pain, of everyday life, but is not so common. The tale is a humorous, virtuous portrait of coeval moral principles and humanity in which the gender gap is not only carefully thought about but also celebrated. Dickey offers real characters and invigorating, believable dialogue. The loves, lives, and losses of four resounding, Los Angeles based African-American men and women are the subjects on which Dickey converges his powers of observation and delicately aligned wit.

About the story
Tyrel is a computer-company executive whose career is far steadier than his love life. His twin sister Mye is a constant source of support in the novel. Tyrel’s best friend, Leonard, is an ambitious stand- up comedian who seems evened for stardom. He was also an unhappy single. When the two best friends meet Debra and Shelby. After a matter of days, Leonard and the light-skinned, quiet but determined Debra, an OB-GYN nurse fall for each other, but it took considerable time for Tyrel and the outspoken, harder-edged Shelby, a flight attendant and who hates being called a "stewardess'', a little longer.

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Los Angeles seems at first a celestial home for the group of four as they ardently hit the beaches, comedy clubs, restaurants, and discos. Then a massive misunderstanding destroys Tyrel and Shelby's romantic relationship, leading them to move to San Francisco and San Diego, respectively. By that time Leonard and Debra got happily married, but were pent-up with their best friends' incapability to unravel their disputes. It took calamity to rejoin lovers ineluctable for each other and to enlighten both couples that friendship is perhaps the most valuable gift they’ve been given.

The cultural touch
When Debra meets Leonard, she has just gotten off the “sex-before-marriage merry-go-round. If he wants to ride, he'll have to produce the gold ring”. Leonard isn’t laughing when he faces that moment in every man's life when he has to decide as to what matters most, and whether he's ready for the love of a good woman, giving a wise and witty look at the human condition from a writer who doesn't make gender an issue, merely a contrariety to celebrate.
Leonard and Debra got happily married and started living in a big house. Both of their jobs are very successful and were as happy as they can be. The cultural touch is depicted by their normal, daily easy to go routine as they started to think about having children. The beautiful cultural of greeting each other in the morning, greeting each other form a hard day from work, making sweet love and enjoying each other’s love for the rest of their lives. Then the tragedy sweeps their happy life away when Leonard gets killed in a car accident leaving Shelby for the rest of her life and an unborn baby. She a widow now relies on her two best friends Shelby and Tyrel for support.

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Eric Jerome Dickey chronicles the lives, loves, and challenges of young African Americans with humor and poignancy that places him clearly alongside such popular authors as Bebe Moore Campbell, Connie Brisco, and Terry McMillan. In Friends and Lovers, two couples set off on different roads in the search for the kind of love that will last. Leonard’s character is of a dark, complicated, and spiritual man who makes his living as an entertainer. He is drawn to her vigor and brilliance of Debra and she, in return falls for his deep sensitivity. They decide on to marry. Shelby and Tyrel are both on the boomerang after turbulent relationships. They fall in love instantaneously, and move in together. When Shelby finds out she is a pregnant, she take a step back and weigh against her predicament to her friend Debra’s. Apprehensive that Tyrel's commitment is not solid and she might wind up a single mother, like her own mom, Shelby precludes Tyrel out. Distorted by feelings of betrayal, he breaks the relationship and flees to Los Angeles. But Leonard tragedy reunites them in an impetus of crisis. The painful reunion emphasizes that there is no right road to love only an ongoing attempt to contend with life and the extraordinary and imperfect ways that it fan out.

Friends and Lovers is a great relationship drama that signifies the conventional African-American scene in Southern California. “As difficult as it seems to have four bright stars in one novel all four characters feel so genuine, they could be neighbors”. It seems that the most recent and long-awaited trend in relationship fiction is the coming out of male authors creating female characters. That is so genuine and tender rich initiating the cultural boundaries to come and try the love of friendship as it is portrayed in the novel. That there is nothing like friendship, Friends and Lovers teach the reader to esteem and make out the true friendship and love when they ornament our lives. That after a while, you may think you're watching a “soap opera’. You then realize that these are not just characters or actors, but they are real people, perchance your friends, relatives, neighbors and co-workers who have shared intrinsic secrets with you.

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The novel comes up with the issues of race, sexual identity, parenting and money, much too importantly portrayed by a black men. It’s surprising, because the black men of America are known to write the history and highlight the discrimination issues in their narration. But here in the Friends and Lovers, Eric comes up with more a delicate issue of love and friendship in the lives of African American and gives insight into the race and the culture of the black men and women. The issues of moral values and the sense of right and wrong are evident by the character of Leonard and Debra. Leonard, a spiritual man values the genuine of a good woman and cares for the good that it brings about. Here, it’s a clear depiction of the values these black men cherish, as Eric portrays Debra as a good woman in his novel that set aside sex before getting married to Leonard.

Racial and ethnic issue
Yes there is and no there is an ethnic or racial issue that props out in the novel. The relationship of Leonard and Debra does not let reader to think about any racism, but yes, there comes a chance that the readers might get in to thinking that the reason for Tyrel and Shelby to get off with their relationship might be due to racial and ethnic conflict. As there is a racial gap between the two well portrayed in the novel. There is however no such gender issue as being superior or inferior, and the gender gap is a piece to celebrate not to form an issue out of it.

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When we talk about human relationships, we are really talking about love. The indifferent love of strangers, the passionate love of friends, awkward, heavenly, and comfortable love. So it is through love that we will enter the domain of relationships, though we cannot restrict it to one segment, it is the essence of the entire narration. “Shit I have a daughter. She can change her value system What bout your son’s value system?” That means the value system change as you change, but the roots remain the same. You cherish the happy family life yet you disregard for fear of love and mistrust.

The author shows that in a humane endurable culture, our sphere of friends will likely be the "fastest growing sector" of our relationship life. The things that the extended families once provided and social workers or therapists or counselors or telephone hot lines and parole officers now provide, our friends and we will provide for each other. Friends who share the growing list the ludicrous and exciting perimeters. Friends to be comfortably at ease with and friends as company through glens of sorrow and awe and despondency, friends to share joys and victories, friends as counselor, guiding and learning, friends as stimulators, put an edge on visions, furbishing dreams, friends in serenity together, breathing together and cogitating, friends as midwives during the labor of birth and the surrender of death. Our friends will be our true riches.

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The margin between friends and lovers is not distinct yet today, and it may be less distinct in the future. But for the characters in the novel and also for most of us there is a difference, a greater intimacy and intensity that usually finds sexual expression, but sex alone is not enough to describe the difference. What has become of our sense of gender? What, today, does it mean to be a woman or a man? This is an age where a woman's lives no longer automatically center around motherhood and man's lives no longer center around physical strength. What we have found is complex and rich, and not easily reduced to slogans.

This is the issue of the novel. No matter, what is said about the novel as being celebrating the gender issue, and as I have discussed above as a source of inspiration. But, truly, this issue arises as Shelby take the decision in her own hands and her lover is dismayed and considers himself betrayed by her attempt of mistrust. But the essence of friendship, which creates the novel as a fabrication of love like friendship relations, bring the two together and makes the reader believe that there is no such gender issue involved and there is no self racism portrayed in the characters of the
 

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