The Game of the Unconscious in Haruki Murakami’s Norwegian Wood

Abstract

The peculiar unpredictability of human psyche had always been a matter of conjecture and curious speculations since the previous century. However, the significant influence of the unconscious in catapulting behavioural changes in human tendencies could never be questioned. In this regard, Murakami’s novels and short stories become a wonderful site for psychoanalytic explorations. Therefore, my paper would trace the contours of literary representations of the characters in Murakami’s Norwegian Wood, the narrative and its undoing while reading meticulously the influence exercised by the unconscious in the creation of these texts. This paper would also graze the limits and functions of unconscious in manipulating the actions of the characters while gauging the impact of these on the construction of the plot on one hand and the reshaping of the self on the other. The dialectics of desire would also assume a significant portion of my research while I would attempt to weave the evidences into a causally connected structure and try to fit it in the discourse of the unconscious.