A Lacanian Psychoanalytical Approach To The Accidental Pallbearer

Frank Lentricchia,the renowned American literary critic,has devoted himself to literary creation in the past two decades,and turns out to be a prolific novelist.However,Lentricchia’s novels don’t receive as much attention from western and domestic academic circles as his previous critical works do.The Accidental Pallbearer,a crime novel published in 2012,unfolds a story about Eliot Conte’s mid-life crisis interwoven with a few criminal cases in nonlinear narrative,highlighting the contradiction between the exterior decency and interior flaws of the protagonist.The thesis explores Eliot’s psychological development and identity construction from the perspective of Lacanian psychoanalysis to find out what contribute to his split subjectivity that engenders his anxiety and frustration and how he finally finds possible ways to construct the wholeness of subjectivity.The thesis consists of five parts:introduction,three chapters and conclusion.The introduction gives a brief account of Frank Lentricchia’s personal background and literature review of his novels,a literature review of Lacanian approaches applied in literature criticism,and the purpose and significance of this research.The main body shows Eliot’s psychological structure and spiritual experience in three dimensions:the Imaginary,the Symbolic and the Real,to disclose the crux of the protagonist’s mental crisis.Constituted by images,the Imaginary in which ego is formed comes first in the psychological development of the subject,and alienation in the Imaginary happens when ego identifies with the specular image.Then it comes to the Symbolic comprised of signifiers.Constructed in this realm,the subject undergoes alienation once it is substituted by signifers in the Symbolic.Different from the Imaginary and the Symbolic,the Real without any lack means wholeness.Meanwhile the Real is beyond symbolization,and is designated with a traumatic quality.In the novel,Eliot forms a split ego after alienation in the Imaginary.Failing to identify with both the imagoes of his parents and the images of masculine characters in American novels,Eliot constructs an illusory perfect ego constituted by the gaze of other people to conceal the dark side of himself.Second,Eliot undergoes alienation in the Symbolic and becomes a split subject due to the oppression of American mainstream culture and Italian American culture.Eliot’s fragmented ego and subject formed in the Imaginary and the Symbolic compose Eliot’s identity crisis,leading to repeated failures in his life.Finally,in his extrication from the chaos and the traumas in the Real,Eliot re-examines himself and accepts his position in the family and in the society as a subject.As a result,his identity crisis is resolved,opening up a new beginning with new possibilities in the future.And it is eventually possible for him to construct the wholeness of subjectivity.A study of Eliot’s identity construction from the perspective of Lacanian Psychoanalysis traces his identity crisis to a family that lacks connections and a society fraught with cultural hybridity as the big Other that brings trauma to modern man.The way out of identity crisis can be found in dialogue that restores intimate relationship from the burden of the past.The Accidental Pallbearer is more than a crime novel.It is a thought-provoking novel dealing with existence of ethnic group.