The Animal Within: The Conflicted Self in Yasmina Reza’s The God of Carnage (2006) | ||||
| CDELT Occasional Papers in the Development of English Education | ||||
| Article 16, Volume 65, Issue 1, July 2018, Page 553-570 PDF (367.69 K) | ||||
| Document Type: Original Article | ||||
| DOI: 10.21608/opde.2018.106588 | ||||
 View on SCiNiTO | ||||
| Author | ||||
| Mahmoud Gaber Gaber | ||||
| Abstract | ||||
| This study attempts through the exploitation of the traditional psychoanalytic approach to critically understand the main causes that lie behind the atmosphere of violence, verbal and physical, that permeates Yasmina Reza’s The God of Carnage. The researcher hypothesizes that a sound explanation for this phenomenon can be sought in Freud’s instinct theory of aggression. In this theory, aggression is viewed as innate rather than acquired; each individual has a natural tendency to be aggressive either towards others or towards the self. Friendliness, thoughtfulness, and love, accordingly, are mere masks that people put on deliberately to hide their animalistic nature behind. The characters of The God of Carnage are an exemplar of humanity at large. They struggle throughout the drama to conceal their aggressiveness behind the masks of civility and good manners. Yet, in the meanwhile, they fall prey to a malignant conflict within their psyches between a demanding animalistic id that keeps nagging in search of gratification and a realistic ego that attempts to keep these destructive urges in check and adopt, instead, the ideals and standards of the human civilization as internalized by the superego. Yet, towards the end of the drama, under the nagging of the id from within and the pressure of frustration from outside, the ego finally surrenders and the id with its destructive impulses dominates; hence, defenses fail, masks are removed, and the savage animal within is set at large destroying through language and physical force whatever is human and civilizational, and the morale of the drama becomes “you cannot control the things that control you.” | ||||
| Keywords | ||||
| Yasmina Reza; The God of Carnage; Aggression; Instinct Theory; Id; Ego; Superego | ||||
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