A Little Place Off the Edgware Road”

Literary analysis for “A little place off the Edgware Road”

-Psychoanalytic criticism

We meet a character called Craven who has a recurrent nightmare in which all the dead people walked in and out of each other's grave. He goes to the cinema where a man sits next to him and starts talking rubbish. Graham Greene has used the psychoanalytic theory in this story. Sigmund Freud developed this theory. Freud's basic contention was that humans have desires, largely sexual in nature, that are denied either because the lifestyle of the person does not allow them to take place, society bans them or the individual himself feels crippling guilt at the possibility of their enactment. In the case of a patient harmed or crippled by neurosis these repressed desires exert an indirect but terrible pressure on the conscious mind, pressure that can change personality and stop a human from functioning effectively as a member of society. Freud believed that the literary artist, far from being mentally ill, was someone who possessed a power to take subliminal, unconscious fixations and communicate them with great strength. Understanding what the author has done is at the same time a gateway back to reality, back to basic urges that govern our mentality.

In this story, some situations show the elements that suits with psychoanalytic theory. The first one is sexual desire.

‘all the way up the Park, he was reminded of passion, but you needed money for love. All that a poor man could get was lust. Love needed a good suit, a car, a flat somewhere or a good hotel. It needed to be wrapped in cellophane’

-‘Pompilia had already stabbed herself-or so Craven supposed- and lay still and buxom among her weeping slaves’ from the two excerpt above, we can see the element of sexual desire. As he is being alone, his desire toward women is not fulfill since he is poor, and he is not having a good shape of body. He always wandering whether there is something wrong with him that make...