A Psychoanalytic Reading of Dawit Wendmagegn’s Novel, Alemenor

Abstract

This thesis is a psychoanalytic reading of Dawit Wendmagegn’s novel ‘Alemenor’. The main aim of this thesis is to contribute in the development of Amharic literature from Psychoanalytic literary criticism point of view. Many researchers have been conducted on literary works from Psychoanalytic Literary Criticism point of view, but the problem is these studies are mostly focused on the literary works written in foreign languages like English. Since Ethiopian literature is mostly in Amharic, those researches didn’t adequately address them. This basic problem which is the main reason for conducting this thesis, because it is believed that researches like this could fill the gap. In the process of filling the gap, the thesis’s objective is to analyze the unconscious motives and defense mechanisms of the characters in the novel ‘Alemenor’. The way to achieve these goals is to follow a textual analysis method and analyze the extracts selected purposively from the novel. The extracts are selected depending on their content of psychoanalytic notions. Those extracts are critically read and analyzed from a specific angle, which bring us to the framework this thesis used. Common psychoanalytic notions like the Id, Ego and Super Ego, Defense Mechanism are used to frame the analysis process. After the analytical process using the theoretical framework, it is found that for the present actions and lives of characters in the novel, their past experiences and unconscious motives have high influence. In relation to this, the psychoanalytical notion of ‘childhood experience leads to adulthood personality’ was also found to be true in the case of the characters in the novel ‘Alemenor.’