Psychoanalytic Criticism Of The Old Man And The Sea

Many creative people express their feelings, thoughts, and cultures in the form of written arts namely literature. It gives knowledge to the readers in the form of information. It contains facts about a person, a place, or an event. In addition, it also describes the way of life in society. Usually, literature is used for referring to works of creative thinking in the form of fiction and nonfiction.

Nowadays, people’s creative abilities to create literary works have a relation with psychology effects in their fiction characters.

In addition, literary works can also teach about psychology which is implied through characters. Therefore, it is important to recognize how the character’s unconsciousness and consciousness that influence its activity and personality in a literary work. Those contain introspection regarding the humans’ experiences that are expected to motivate and to give moral and social values for the readers.

The character’s psychology can be analyzed through psychoanalytic criticism. It has advantages to interpret the literature and to know the writer’s feelings (Sumiati, 2016).

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Furthermore, it is a part of literary psychology. Literary psychology has four possibility interpretations. The first is the author’s psychology study as an individual. The second one is the study of the creative process. The third is the study of psychology types and laws in the literary works. The last is the study of literary impacts for the readers. Meanwhile, the most related to the literature is the third interpretation (Wellek & Warren, 1995: 81).

One of the novels that are interesting to be analyzed because of the psychology aspect is “The Old Man and the Sea”.

The novel is written by Ernest Hemingway in 1951 in Cuba. It was published in 1952. It is one of Hemingway’s famous fiction works. In 1953, it got award from the Pulitzer Prize for fiction, Award of Merit Medal from American Academy of Letters, and The Nobel Prize in Literature in 1954 (Drabble, 1996). In addition, “The Old Man and the Sea” has a simple writing style that contains deep meanings and the plot is described in detail.

This novel tells about Santiago. He is an old fisherman in Cuba. He had not got fishes for 84 days. Because of that, many people talked about him and judged him as the unlucky person. But Santiago did not give up. He believed that he would be successful in the next day. The process of his conscious minds for achieving his goals can be analyzed using Alfred Adler’s theory about individual psychology. Adler argues that an individual starts life with the physical weakness that activates inferiority feeling, the feeling that changes people to become superiority or to be successful (Suryabrata, 1983: 187).

This research focuses on the main character in The Old Man and the Sea novel written by Ernest Hemingway. The researcher wants to analyze the main character’s conscious minds based on Alfred Adler’s Individual Psychology theory. Therefore, this research is entitled “The Main Character’s Conscious Minds in The Novel ‘The Old Man and the Sea’ Written by Ernest Hemingway (A Psychoanalytic Criticism)”.

The researcher chooses some suitable graduating papers as references to support this research. The first is written by Lenka Marakova (2011) entitled The Interpretation of Hemingway’s The Old Man and Sea. The second is written by Azizah Kurniati (2014) entitled Between Despair and Spirit of Life Reflected in Ernest Hemingway’s The Old Man and Sea (1952). The third is Moral Values in Ernest Hemingway’s “The Old Man and the Sea”, that is written by Henry Febriyanto Santoso (2014). The fourth is written by Yuan Abadi (2015) entitled Santiago’s Machoism in Ernest’s The Old Man and the Sea. The fifth is written by Alik Alhakamul Khusna (2018) entitled Heroism Reflected in Ernest Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea (1952): A Marxist Approach.