A Study On Exit Ghost From The Perspective Of Freudian Psychoanalysis

Philip Roth(1933-2018)is one of the most outstanding Jewish-American writers,and one of the most respectable writers in contemporary American literature.He is a prolific writer,and has been nominated for the Nobel Price for Literature many times.His Exit Ghost,published in 2007,is the last one of his Zuckerman novels.It tells the story about how a seventy-one-year-old writer Nathan Zuckerman who went back to New York from the countryside life suffered from the ceaseless conflicts between his id and his ego when he was in New York.Finally he released his libidinal desires and wishes in an appropriate way and left everything behind and went back to the serene and isolated mountain area after the fierce battles of his id and ego.Psychoanalysis,founded by Sigmund Freud,has come into being since the 1820 s and was divided into different schools.Gradually it has been widely applied to the literary analysis to explore the characters in literary works and the profound implications of the artistic works.Freud puts forward three notions,namely the conscious,the preconscious,and the unconscious,based on which he further divides the individual's mental apparatus into three parts—the id,the ego,and the super-ego.In order to explain the relationship between people's experiences and their mental process explicitly,he also proposes the interpretation of dreams.Many of Philip Roth's works review Freudian psychoanalysis,so does the work Exit Ghost.From the prospect of Freudian psychoanalysis,this thesis analyzes the sexual and living predicaments of the protagonist Zuckerman in Exit Ghost,and further explores human beings' living condition and life meanings through analyzing awakeness,repression and release of the protagonist's desires,and dissecting Zuckerman's fantasies and dream with Freudian psychoanalytic theories about the id,the ego,the super-ego,the repression,the unconscious,fantasies and the interpretation of dreams.Apart from Introduction and Conclusion,there are three chapters in the thesis.The introduction firstly tells Philip Roth's creation features and his literary achievements and the story of Exit Ghost;and then it summarizes the literary review both at home and abroad on this novel,and points out the similar views in this work with Freudian psychoanalysis and the significance of studying this novel from this perspective;lastly,it combs the development of psychoanalysis,and emphatically introduces the crucial notions of Freudian psychoanalysis.Chapter One analyzes the awakeness of Zcukerman's desires.With Freudian psychoanalytic theories about the id,the ego,and the unconscious,this chapter examines Zuckerman's internal fluctuations and his hopes and desires,and explores how his desires repressed in his unconscious came into his conscious again in different psychological situations,such as when he lived in New York,when he was living in the countryside,and after his return to New York.Chapter Two probes into the manifestations of Zuckerman's repressions.According to Freudian psychoanalytic theories about the id,the ego,the super-ego,and the repression theory,this chapter further explores his resistance and repression of internal desires when he was facing the sexual attraction from women,the threats of being speechless because of the rising young writer and the cruel reality,for example,the urinary incontinence,impotence and memory loss brought by aging.Chapter Three dissects the release of Zuckerman's desires.Under Freudian psychoanalysis about the super-ego,libido displacement,condensations and sublimation as well as some related theories about the interpretation of dreams,this chapter explains how Zuckerman released his libidinal energies by various ways,such as displacement,sublimation and in dreams,to fulfill his wish of integrating into American society,release his sexual desires to women,and complete his Oedipus complex in the unconscious.The conclusion summarizes the protagonist's physical and psychological predicaments in Exit Ghost and further reflects Roth's humanistic concern for the protagonist in this novel and modern human.The individual may want to connect with the world by identity recognition or resist against the fate of aging and death by sexual capacity,but eventually he will find out that under the constrains of social conventions,all of those can't be realized by releasing the desires of the id.Instead the individual should stick to the self under the guidance of morality and the super-ego in order to realize and accept himself and his self-identity.