Literary notes about unbearable (AI summary)
The term "unbearable" has long served as a versatile and potent descriptor in literature, capturing both physical discomfort and the depths of emotional or social distress. Authors employ it to heighten a reader’s sense of crisis or excess, as when characters describe overwhelming environments—be it the clamor of a noisy saloon ([1]) or the stifling heat aboard a vessel ([2], [3])—or the intensity of personal suffering, as illustrated by poignant references to despair and isolation ([4], [5]). In other instances, "unbearable" is ascribed to less tangible yet equally potent forces such as a character’s arrogance ([6]) or the disheartening monotony of life ([7]). Whether articulating a profound inner torment or critiquing external conditions, writers across different genres and eras harness the term to evoke an immediate, visceral reaction, inviting readers to confront the limits of endurance in both spirit and circumstance.
- Owing to the excessive reverberation of the saloon in the Hotel 'The City of London,' the noise was unbearable.
— from My Life — Volume 1 by Richard Wagner - The Nautilus was no longer moving, the heat was becoming unbearable.
— from Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea by Jules Verne - The heat had become unbearable.
— from Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas: An Underwater Tour of the World by Jules Verne - But after a while the agony became unbearable.
— from The Hungry Stones, and Other Stories by Rabindranath Tagore - A wife is a burden enough to a man, in all conscience, and to add to it the burden of this blindness was to make his life unbearable.
— from The Hungry Stones, and Other Stories by Rabindranath Tagore - An unbearable arrogance took possession of him.
— from English Literature by William J. Long - After three weeks she had found a wife’s life irksome and, later on, when she was beginning to find it unbearable, she had become a mother.
— from Dubliners by James Joyce
