Philippine E-Journals

Crossing to Safety

Lilia Maria Sevillano

Discipline: Humanities

 

Abstract:

In today's fast-paced lifestyle, one of the things that suffer most is human relationships. Crossing to Safety depicts how two couples struggle to keep their respective marriages intact. The novel is very down-to-earth and realistic in its portrayal of the ups and downs of married tife. On a larger scale, it is also a novel of youth and age, of family and friends, joy and sorrow, the whole gamut of emotions and experiences of a lifetime. Stegner does not romanticize this but presents the characters with all their imperfections, and in the process, constructs an ideal of how life and love should be lived. The universal themes oflove, death, friendship are there. Yet Stegner incorporates these into the relationship of both couples to achieve a complete picture.