A Psychoanalytic Reading of Brookner's Novels in the Light of Lacan

Anita Brookner is one of the important contemporary British novelists and this book has attempted to investigate the nature of the characters she creates by focusing on their subjectivity throughout a close examination of her selected novels. Reading Brookner’s typical characters through Lacanian perspective is interesting since her novels are obsessed with traces of the unconscious. Jacques Lacan’s theories and Brooknerian typical characters are used focusing on the subjectivity construction of her major and minor characters corresponding to Lacan’s tripartite model. Brooknerian characters are illustrated as Lacanian subjects imprisoned under the impact of the symbolic order living in an exile. The characters are unable to break the boundaries of subjectivity. The repressed abandoned isolated women and men suffer lack of recognition and are consistently unable to fit into the symbolic order properly. Living as submissive obedient subjects these alienated split figures suffer a sense of displacement.