INTRODUCTION The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao and Bless Me, Ultima are stories told to us years after the fact. In Yunior’s case, enough time has passed for his ex-girlfriend Lola to have borne a daughter by another man. And Lola’s daughter is old enough for Yunior to be able to observe how she has “her mother’s [strong] legs.” Antonio likewise locates his story in the “magical time of childhood.” Thus the extent to which we can trust what their narrators recount to us is at the mercy of their narrators’ memory of long-ago events. But human memory is riddled with biases. According to memory researched Elizabeth Loftus of the University of California, Irvine, people can forget fights they had, people they once knew, and all manner of details across time and place. Even eyewitnesses in very serious felony cases – i.e., people who have a big interest in accurately recalling an event – have been known to “remember” …show more content…
Why do storytellers and their literary characters make the linguistic and behavioral choices they make? To offer answers to such why questions, the psychoanalytic literary critic reads stories for hidden evidence of repressed emotions and psychological conflicts (e.g., desires, fears, guilts, childhood traumas, dysfunctional relationships, sexual frustrations, and so on). Insofar as psychoanalytic concepts are useful in understanding the psychology behind why humans make the linguistic and behavioral choices they make, they must also be useful in understanding the psychology of human behavior in literature. And psychoanalytic concepts are useful in understanding the psychology of why we make the choices we make: the libido, Freudian slips, and the ego; narcissism and sibling rivalry; the adjective anal and the verb project — all are psychoanalytic concepts that most of us have never heard formally defined before yet we rely on them almost daily when we gossip and