The Tyranny of Love and Despair

What happens when our desires conflict with our ethics? These stories interrogate happiness built on suffering.

David Foster Wallace anatomizes depression from the inside—the prison of self-consciousness, the exhausting performance of being a person who is exhausted. George Saunders shows how fear corrupts love into violence, how the desire to protect can become the impulse to destroy. Le Guin’s Omelas asks the impossible question: would you accept paradise if it required one child’s eternal suffering? And if not—where do you walk when you walk away?

Is love ever a tyranny? What kind of happiness do these texts reject?