Harlan Ellison's Shattered Like A Glass Goblin

Sigmund Freud, a world-renowned psychologist, best known for his work revolving around psychoanalytical psychology and the unconscious, came up with an idea called the “return of the repressed”. This idea details that individuals often lodge antisocial desires and impulses deep within our unconsciousness. Gail Hornstein calls these hidden desires and impulses “offending material”. In the case of Harlan Ellison’s short gothic story, “Shattered Like a Glass Goblin”, these materials are the physical and emotional changes of the characters in the story. Within the story, there are strong examples of how drugs like marijuana can open the seal and let free a human’s animalistic and savage inclinations.

In the beginning, examples of the human inhabitants …show more content…
Once Rudy delves into the basement of the house is it then he realizes what has happened to him and the others in the house. They have all become like monsters, the first being Teddy, who had become “attached to the slime-coated upper wall of the basement, hanging close to the stone,”(322), he now he a rubbery arm that he lets hang idly by his side. Along with Teddy, Victor has become a creature with ribbed leather wings, and Jonah is seen gargoyled. Some of the inhabitants are even seen around Adrianne, sucking “the yellow fluid from the bloated pus-pockets that had been her breasts and her buttocks.”(322) The true effects of the drugs have finally been shown as they release all the savage instincts that all the people in the house always had, or at least revealed them to both Rudy and the reader. The story fails to resolve the return of these impulses, as it allows the drugs to consume and forever alter the abusers. It allows some to kill and harvest the body of Adrianne, and then shows us the transformation of Rudy into a glass goblin, one that is fragile. The drugs in the story allow the true colors of all the people in the house to be shown, to show what they really are. When Rudy sees himself in the mirror, he is “transparent, that there was nothing inside him”(323). It shows how hollow of a man he had become, when Kris smashes him into millions of pieces, it is revealed to Rudy that she was a wolf in sheep's clothing, and that her denial of his love shattered his spirit and gumption. He had become a shell of himself, and he had fallen prey to her and the drugs that entranced him to become okay with that resolution, until that truth came back to destroy