Escaping From Prison To Paradise: A Lacanian Reading Of John Cheever’s Falconer

John Cheever, who builds his fame upon his fantastic short stories, is called “Chekhov of the suburbs”. However, it is the novels that make his writing career to a higher level, some of which derive from or reflect John Cheever’s own personal experience and mirror his chaotic life. Among those novels, Falconer is one of John Cheever’s masterpieces. To some extent, Falconer is the psychological autobiography of John Cheever, in which the protagonist Farragut experiences loneliness, alienation, desperation and rebirth just like what the author John Cheever himself has experienced in the real life. The novel is about Farragut’s personal experience from an innocent baby to a successfully escaped prisoner, and in that experience he fights against Name of the Father in order to achieve the ideal ego and complete subject from the psychological aspect, as a result of finding his identity in the society. The beginning of the novel is about Farragut’s entering the prison while the ending is his successful escape from it. The beginning corresponds with the ending perfectly, just like the cycle of a life. From the psychoanalytic aspect, it is a novel about Farragut’s pursuit of self-identity by experiencing different psychological periods.Based on the present research, the paper makes a research on Cheever’s Falconer from the psychoanalytic perspective. As a result, it is no doubt that the novel Falconer is a remarkable piece of confession. He expresses his inner alienation, depression and rebirth elaborately through the male protagonist Farragut. The thesis will use Lacan’s psychoanalytic theories to explore Farragut’s efforts to find his identity as well as reveal the process of his self-destruction and self-rebirth, interpreting the ending of Farragut’s successful escape and John Cheever’s returning to normal life from rehabilitation which require a constant search for an ideal unified ego and a complete subjectivity.This thesis will include three parts. The introduction part will make a brief introduction to John Cheever and his masterpiece Falconer, followed by a literature review of previous studies done on it and the significance of the research.The first chapter mainly deals with the protagonist Farragut in the Mirror Stage. Though Farragut in the Mirror Stage forms a split ego like anyone else in the world, he keeps identifying with others. Because of his incompetent father, he has been long staying in the Imaginary Order. Away from the human society, he has been living in his paradise until the split ego as a serpent seduces him to kill his brother.The second chapter analyses Farragut’s process of forming the castrated and split subject in the Symbolic Order under Name of the Father named by Lacan. When the culture and language contradict his inner world, he struggles and suffers. In order to get Other’s recognition, the Other’s desires becomes his desires, so the desire for freedom is deeply rooted in his mind. The successive incidents make him have some doubts about the Christianity, so he is lost in the prison.The third chapter explores the process of Farragut’s fights against Name of the Father to regain his paradise, during which his psychology changes a lot. It seems that he adopts the way of self-destruction to give up the building of his subject, but his body and mind conceives the hope of the mental and physical rebirth. A close reading of Farragut’s sense of life and death and what he sees and does after breaking prison illustrates his successful building of his ego and subject as well as his regained belief in Christianity.The conclusion part concludes that the book Falconer, serving as an autobiographic psychological novel of John Cheever, provides a solution for the lost middle class to find the identity and subject. That is taking action both mentally and physically to fight against the society, represented by Name of the Father named by Lacan to the end. This is the self-salvation.