Being complete is such a weird notion. It has eleven different definitions, some referring to grammar and others mathematics. But when someone says it in reference to themselves, it’s a little harder to quantify. Does it mean they want to feel satisfied? Content? Happy? Or is it as simple as just feeling whole? As if they really lack nothing.
I just found it interesting how this story played with different themes of being complete. Like being born a pair, but not really. Before Asterios even realized that he was born a twin, he recognized a lack. Always looking over his shoulder and expecting…just something to be there. The knowledge that he was supposed to have an identical brother, rather than creating a sense of closure, only made an opening. Thoughts like, “Would he have been just like me? Better than me, worse than me” crowded in and he could never feel truly satisfied with anything he did.
I find it interesting that that writer introduced the Aristophanes treatise in Plato’s “Symposium”, although Mazzucchelli kind of left out that it is a speech about romantic love. Basically, Aristophanes put forth the idea that there is a special type of love that connects people, a soul mate. He goes on to say that there were once three genders: male, female and a combination of the two. That these sexes in truth represented one’s soul and when the third gender split in half it created a mirror image of each. He thought that love was the search for the other half of one’s soul. Aristophanes also believed that this search for love showed a certain “lack”, as if being separated meant one was fated to die incomplete. Although, Mazzucchelli related through drawings of man’s drive to complete himself <Asterios in different modes of copulation> it can’t only be implied that his completion would be felt through a female. Maybe he was a fourth gender, his twin and the lives that would have played out had he been born alive.
This lack of completion follows through on a romantic level as well, with his wife Hana. The writer even has a blatant reason for why they were attracted to each other and why it didn’t work. At one point he even positions them in the extremely recognizable symbol of yin and yang. This Chinese philosophy explains how polar or seemingly opposite forces are interconnected but also interdependent. Asterios even comments about how well they fit together, how their lives just folded together so neatly. But this “fit” couldn’t override the fact that the could barely communicate on the same level.
When the marriage breaks up Asterios is left floundering again, completely lost and still searching.
Duality and completion just kept battling each other right to the end.