Identity Crisis and the Effect of Society in the The Remain of the Day and Never Let Me Go through the Lens of Eric Erikson

Document Type : Research Paper

Authors

1 Department of Drama, Tarbiat Modares University, Tehran, Iran.

2 Department of Painting, Soore University, Tehran, Iran.

Abstract

Psychoanalytical exploration of literary works in our contemporary era has prominently increased and indisputably Freud's theories on dramatic characters played a significant role in this momentum. Eric Erikson, one of Freud's prominent students, was the first psychoanalyst who introduced the concept of identity crisis into the world. He selected an experimental approach towards human life and studied human life and psyche in totality by classifying it into eight distict stages: infancy, early childhood, preschool, school age, adolescence, young adulthood, middle adulthood and maturity. In his theory, he proposed concepts such as epigenetic principle, ritualization, ritualism and psychosocial moratorium. In this research, we will analyze "Mr. Stevens" as the main character of The Remains of the Day and "Kathy" the main character of Never Let Me Go from the standpoint of Erickson’s theory and will thoroughly investigate the relationships between characters and their societies to illustrate how they mutually affect one another. We conclude that this reciprocal encounter of characters with both society and environment lead to the characters’ identity crisis.

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References

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Research in Contemporary World Literature
Volume 29, Issue 1
July 2024
Pages 21-43

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