Family Loyalty in Literature: The Inner Conflicts We Encounter in Dealing with Family Relationships

Coming from a Latino culture, my life revolves around the importance of having family relationships that are loving and supportive. But my culture’s ideals clash with the American ideals of family, and it sometimes becomes difficult for me to appease my family while at the same time trying to do what makes me happy. And not only do I grapple with cultural differences, but I also fight with differences between the generational concepts of my parents’ time compared to the ones of my time. We encounter such conflicts in thousands of literary works, which give us another venue to examine and analyze situations with a little distance. In choosing to analyze the theme of family loyalty, I came across short stories of three powerful authors: Amy Tan, Flannery O’Connor, and James Baldwin. These three authors composed unique settings with generational differences between their story’s main characters to show the inner conflicts one deals with in the name of family