Salvation Army Character Analysis

According to John le Carre, “love is whatever you can still betray. Betrayal can only happen if you love. In the auto-fiction novel, Salvation Army by Abdellah Taïa, love can never seem to escape the fate of betrayal. As Taïa takes readers through different periods of his life, he shows them how often love experiences hardships. Hardships that sometimes work out, but usually end in chaos. Through secondary character stories, as well as his own personal experiences, Taïa demonstrates an overreaching theme that even the strongest love between two people can lead to devastating betrayal. In the beginning of the novel, Taïa first introduces his love and betrayal theme through his parent’s whirlwind relationship. His parents first appear as a strange couple that segregate themselves by not sharing a bedroom. Regardless of this fact, the reader experiences the tension between his parents through their constant fighting. This tension appears to stem from a past event where Taïa’s father believed that his mother betrayed him with her own …show more content…
Before, he was experiencing love through other people, or relationships that were strictly one-sided. But, with Jean, it is his first time tangoing with real love. The relationship started off smoothly and Taïa was, “delighted to have a man of my own, someone who was interested in me… in some ways the man of my dreams” (Taïa, 90). But, then, the love and betrayal theme makes an appearance once again. While Jean was visiting Taïa in Tangiers, he invited another young Moroccan, Mohamed, to dinner with them. In this moment, Taïa started to think that his relationship with Jean was not exactly what he thought it to be. He felt betrayed by him, stating that, “a dark cloud settled over my head, a nimbus it was impossible to send away, impossible to put into words” (Taïa, 100). And from this point, their relationship began the slow, all too familiar,