Pangs of Lacanian Desire, Pleasure & Guilt in the Protagonists of Wuthering Heights and The Guide: A Comparative Reading

Since the days of yore, literature has depicted the real human desires, crisis, expectations, and experiences - tragic, romantic, and traumatic - all across the world. In fact, there are such artefacts in the world literature which give space to sharp attacks of mental anguish, pangs of remorse, pangs of guilt or pangs of disappointment. The fact behind this real depiction is an author's presence within a society as a human being. Whatever he / she sees and experiences can't escape his / her pen especially if he / she is a creative writer. So, an artefact is invariably an outcome of an author's aliveness to his/her surroundings, times and happenings. Even the characters, chosen by an author are lifted among the people he/she comes across in the real society. The creativity of an author has to play its great role in making or shaping everything in a work of art. Since one of literature's greatest gifts is the portrayal of characters who are larger than life and in whom we can recognize matchless motivations, ego crisis, expectations, and emotions with distinctive powers of mind. This has attracted scholars to apply various theories especially psychological for tracing newer depths of meanings in them. Exploring the inner behavioural pangs and psychological conflicts of some of literature's most famous characters by applying psychoanalytic theories to understand their behavior and crisis has added more to our understanding. In this backdrop, initially Freud's and later Lacan's discovery of the dynamic unconscious is arguably the most important contributions to our understanding of the human mind. Further, any psychoanalytical reading reveals newer insights and innovations in an artefact. This paper is a modest attempt to interpret the main characters in Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights and R.K. Narayan's The Guide from two different eras, cultures and soils through psychoanalytical lens and thus try to understand their overall pangs of desire, pleasure and crime by applying Lacanian Psychoanalytical tools / framework for tracing newer insights in a comparative literary analysis.