ABSTRACT
In this chapter, the authors elaborate and expand in the context of F. Kafka's Metamorphosis, B. Pomerance's The Elephant Man, and B. Golding's The Inheritors. They show how the literary device opens up a door into the unconscious in a story, play, and novel. Gregor Samsa, the main character of Kafka's Metamorphosis, is transformed into an impossibly large insect at the very beginning of the story. The Elephant Man comes to symbolize the general repression of the Victorian, and by extension, the modern age, especially its refusal to look at the dark side of its own image. Treves, the principal character, is presented as the epitome of the values of his age, and yet he must pay a price. The Inheritors shows how the oedipal functioning of the "new people" is in some ways a step backward from the transitional culture of their more primitive predecessors. The book makes clear that violence enters human culture only after the oedipal advance.
