Water for Elephants Love

Jacob loves Marlena so much that he's "glad she went first"; he wants to protect her from being alone the way he is. It seems to him that it would be less painful to disappear than to suffer through that. (Also, check out how he uses the same phrase to describe the feeling of losing Marlena as he does to describe August's brutal murder: what's up with that?)

Marlena is so unhappy here because her beloved horse is dying. Shouldn't this be a "Suffering" quote? Marlena is "stoic" at first, but then she "moan[s]," starts "bawling," and then "gasping for breath." Sure sounds like suffering to us, but this is suffering at the hands of love. The two feelings often go together; without experiencing such strong love, she wouldn't experience such strong pain.

This may not be the most passionate quotation, but it's a quiet expression of love. To be "completely faithful" to someone for "more than sixty years" is a huge commitment. Odds are, there's a lot of love there after sixty years. And to say that your wife had "extraordinary understanding" is pretty high praise.

One neat thing about this book is how much love the human characters have for animals. You hear about animals being mistreated at circuses, and certainly that's shown in the book through characters like August. But for every individual like him there's someone like Jacob, who cares for animals so "tenderly" that he feels like he's overflowing with love for them.

Love is a strong emotion and one that's closely attached here to its opposite, equally strong emotion: hate. Jacob's hate for August arises, at least in part, because he's in love with his wife. He's also getting "close" to feeling love for the elephant that is technically is under August's supervision. Jacob might also hate August for other reasons, as listed in the quotation, but he probably wouldn't feel quite so strongly about August if he didn't feel so strongly about Marlena and Rosie, too.

Several times in the book Jacob compares the idea of love rising up in himself to a wave. Here he says that he's "overflowing, bursting with love." It's almost like love is a physical thing that he can feel moving through his body. It's not just an intangible emotion; it's almost like a foreign object sweeping through him. That might mean that he feels like this love is out of his control – it's larger than him and takes him over.

It took the appearance of real love for Marlena to realize that there was no love in her life. She didn't know how bad things were until Jacob showed up and helped her understand what real love could be. The discovery of something so good made her understand that she could no longer cope with a situation as bad as her current one with August.

This is Jacob's version of August's apology to Marlena. The apology is full of hyperbolic statements of how much August loves Marlena, full of over-the-top praise, base "remorse," and intense pleading. Yet it all kind of rings hollow. Jacob, Marlena, and everyone listening know how August has treated her. If he really did love her that much, how could he have been so cruel? It's hard to trust anything he says to her.

It takes a lot of courage to say you love someone, especially if you're the first one. Jacob emphasizes that Marlena has only told him that she "need[s]" him and so he takes a leap of faith to figure out exactly where they stand in their relationship. It's a very modern action for a 1930s guy.

Jacob says here that he would have loved Marlena's child even if August had been the father. They were going to become a family, and that's what he had signed on for. Still, it might have been a little more challenging to love someone with August's DNA. Luckily the child has "red hair," which shows that he's clearly Jacob's.