TY  - BOOK
AU  - Alfaihan,Reem Khaled
AU  - Mohammadzadeh,Behbood
TI  - A COMPARATIVE PSYCHOANALYTIC STUDY OF  HEART OF DARKNESS AND THE UNDERGROUND  RAILWAY
PY  - 2022///
KW  - Heart of Darkness
KW  - Dissertations, Academic
KW  - The Underground Railway
KW  - Imperialism
KW  - Psychoanalysis
KW  - Psychoanalysis in literature
KW  - Racism
N1  - Thesis (MA) - Cyprus International University. Institute of Graduate Studies and Research English Language Literature Department; Includes bibliography (sheets 60-64)
N2  - ABSTRACT
A symbol can be used to express a concept, make it acceptable, elicit suppressed or 
buried emotions, offer a release, or improve or depict something. It explores the 
underlying meanings of specific words and imagery that the author employs to 
obliquely portray a particular message. Heart of Darkness, for example, represents the 
realities of racism, and Underground Railway, the means of obtaining escape. This 
study aims to use the concept of psychoanalysis, which allows one to comprehensively 
understand literary works, to analyze two novels titled Heart of Darkness and The 
Underground Railroad. Psychoanalysis is a set of psychological ideas and therapeutic 
approaches that originated from Sigmund Freud's work and theories. The fundamental 
concept of psychoanalysis is that everyone has unconscious thoughts, emotions, 
memories, and ambitions. The aim of this research is to compare two different authors 
who wrote two novels that mainly focus on the concepts of racism, rebellion,
imperialism, violence, and authority. The research selected these two novels as there 
was not much analysis conducted on them in the literature. Besides, it allows the 
readers to have a deeper understanding of the two novels and their characters which 
are written from two different ethnical backgrounds. Therefore, this study will include 
a detailed investigation of the main characters presented in the two novels Heart of 
Darkness by Joseph Conrad and The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead. 
Through this study, firstly, we will be introduced to two different authors with different 
ideologies who concentrate on the same concepts through their novels. Secondly, we
will have psychoanalysis of the main protagonists, Marlow, and Kurtz, in The Heart 
of Darkness, and also Cora and Ridgway in The Underground Railway. Thirdly, we
will illustrate the reasons behind racism and highlight the main reasons which turn a
person to be racist by providing examples from the novels. Fourthly, we will present 
the other side of the truth that whites tried to hide in the world of civilizing by using 
evidence of Africans from the two books which were humiliated under this title. The 
final results of this research highlight the idea that humans are a mixture of good and 
evil, and no one is born a racist person. Also, the results prove that racism does not
concern skin colour; instead, it is related to how we should be just human while we are 
dealing with each other, no matter how there are differences between us. 
Keywords: Heart of Darkness, Imperialism, Psychoanalysis, Racism, Resistance, 
Rebellion, The Underground Railway.
ER  -