Love in La

Love in L.A.

The story “Love in L.A.” is a short story written by Dagoberto Gilb in 1986. It is a love story based on realistic approaches. One of the main characters was Jake, who was dreaming while driving. However, this caused an accident; he crashed into a Toyota that was in front of him. Mariana, who was the other main character in “Love in L.A.” short story, was the driver of the Toyota. After crashing the car, instead of finding out what had happened to the driver of the car Jack was looking at his car to realize if everything is good with it. Once he saw that the Toyota’s driver was a pretty woman started flirting with her; he was trying to get out of the situation in this way. However, when he realized that the plan didn’t work he gave Mariana false information about his car’s insurance, and even about his driver license. The story shows us the life’s eternity (progress of life) life's eternity life's eternity, the selfishness of people, and the naive of girls. We are living in a life where no one can see the end of it. We are breathing without even knowing what will happen to us a minute later. Life is like a road. Sometimes it seems that it’s an endless journey that we have to go through. From time to time we crash with different circumstances in our lives which make us slow down. But, it just happens once in a while because life flows (runs) so fast that nothing can stop it; the only choice that we have is to follow it. Each one of us chooses how to live through this difficult, busy, and for some people senseless life. One of the main characters Jack, decided to live his life without giving to it any meaning. He didn’t strive to acquire something; he was just dreaming without doing anything to fulfill his daydreams. “New” Critics would say that looking at this story they see that Jack can go through the road, but he chose the freeway which symbolizes the life’s progress. Either in life or in freeway if you are not paying attention, or you strayed from the road you will have a crash. However, the life goes on, and which way we choose, and no matter the circumstances we continue our journey and our mission in it. The next important lesson that this story gives us is showing the selfishness of people. Selfishness is one of the characteristics that ruin people’s lives. Being selfish means loving only yourself without seeing, or thinking about anyone or anything else. Every person is a little bit selfish in the deep inside, but everything has its limits, so does selfishness. In the short story “Love in L.A.” Jack was so selfish that even after crashing into a car instead of finding out what had happened to the driver of the car he was looking at his car to make sure that no harm came to it. This shows that Jack was only thinking about himself. Also, he was so egocentric that in order to save himself he lied to the girl by showing and telling her false stories about his car and its documents. Even the fact that he liked that girl didn’t prevent him of telling lies. That’s why he had no one standing by his side, except the car that he had. Last, but not least thing that the story shows is the naive of girls. We are living in a cruel life where almost every person lies. Some of them do it intentionally, but some of them do it without trying to harm someone; it just happens. It is obvious that girls are more naive than boys. May be it depends on the gender differences. Even though, women have almost the same rights as men have, they still differ from each other. As in real life, in our short story, in order to leave an impression of a nice and an honest person Jack lied to Mariana. And as almost every girl Mariana believed his words. A Feminist would say that even though the girls have almost the same rights as boys, they still educated in different way. This is one of the many reasons why girls are more naive than boys. In conclusion, Dagoberto Gilb’s “Love in L.A.” short story teaches us never to stop in our life journey, to be aware of selfish people, and to be nimble. It also teaches us not only to dream but, to do everything in order to make our dreams to reality.