THE GROTESQUE IN FIRST-PERSON NARRATION: PSYCHOANALYSIS AND NARRATOLOGY (MATURIN, IRELAND; POE, BRONTE, GRILLPARZER, AUSTRIA; RILKE)

This dissertation examines the first-person narrator in grotesque narratives from the Gothic novel through modernism. Modern writers have often relied on first-person narration as a narrative technique for probing the depths of the unconscious. My investigation employs psychoanalytic concepts such as the repetition-compulsion, identification, parapraxes, and sublimation as formal structures within the act of narration in first-person grotesque fiction. These Freudian paradigms form the basis of my analyses of Maturin's Melmoth the Wanderer, Poe's "Berenice," Bronte's Wuthering Heights, Grillparzer's "Der arme Spielmann," and Rilke's Die Aufzeichnungen des Malte Laurids Brigge.;I note the historical link between the confessional mode of narration and the grotesque. As Gothic novelists pursued the impulse to explore the workings of individual unconsciousness, they began to exploit the literary possibilities of narrative techniques inherent in the autobiographical genre. In the nineteenth century, virtually every grotesque narrative was composed from the first-person point of view.;Freud's theory on the compulsion to repeat is especially useful for explicating the responses of literary narrators. The first-person narrator, unconsciously disturbed by some previous traumatic experience, attempts to reenact the original obsession by relating his autobiographical tale.;Do readers identify with first-person narrators? By applying a psychoanalytic definition to the narrative process, I conclude that readers do not identify with fictional characters based on superficial personality traits; rather, people identify with the act of confessional narration. We project ourselves onto that character because of the shared first-person pronoun.;First-person narrators betray their inner compulsions through the act of narrating their confessional tale. I explore the possibility that the act of narration serves as a form of sublimation for the narrator (and the author) of a grotesque fiction.