Psychological Realism

Salizaliha Mustapha (1) notes that "psychological realism in literary texts offers the possibility for readers to reconstruct each aspect of information offered in a text through different angles or perspectives." In Shakespeare's Macbeth, Franz Kafka's The Metamorphosis, and Edgar Allan Poe's "The Pit and the Pendulum," all three authors resort to the use of psychological realism to reinforce their themes and to provide audiences with multiple perspectives or psychological frames of reference with which to understand them and their characters. By using psychological realism, all of the authors make us identify more readily with the human beings in their works as they make choices and confront circumstances that radically transform their psychological and physical states. Macbeth's ambition will lead to his death, Gregor Samsa's transformation into a giant insect leads to his death but also to the blossoming of his sister, and the prisoner in "The Pit and the Pendulum" is terrorized psychologically before his ultimate liberation. This analysis will discuss the use of psychological realism in each of these three works and what the impact of the respective author's use is on the reader. A conclusion will address how the unvarnished nature of realism provides deeper insight and understanding into human behavior.

Macbeth provides us with realistic psychological states of Macbeth and Lady Macbeth that not only show the inherent capacity for evil in human nat

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ealized long ago that human beings can't live with such a creature" (Kafka 125). Of course this is Gregor and it is an element of psychological realism that the author makes us realize that the main problem for Gregor's family is that they cannot accept the unpleasant wasting away of dying that is part of life. We will see how it is unbearable to endure the psychological torture of Poe's prisoner in "The Pit and the Pendulum," as it is in Kafka's work, where realism often makes us see why we wish for illusions or masks to help cope with the often painful and repulsive nature of reality. This theme is repeated in the murderous and immoral Macbeth and in a father who throws objects at his sick son Gregor because he is repulsed by him and fears him. As Hill (161) writes: The point is, however, that the creature is Gregor, and the implication of the denial is that only when the family (or society) refuses to recognize the true nature of Gregor (the loathsome aspects of wasted living) can life remain tolerable. Kafka uses psychological realism in order to provide us with Gregor's perspective to show how isolated and alienated the individual who is dying remains from the living. Gregor's father throws an appl

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