The novel is difficult to understand because it does not have a clear beginning, middle, and end, unlike many traditional stories we have grown accustomed to. Dreams, mythical creatures, and various stories told by other characters plague the novel, blending in so well with the narrator’s actual experiences. These elements, in a sense, only distract the story and the narrator and help the narrator avoid his unpleasant thoughts and experiences. Aside from the fact that Daniel starts out as a psychology major in college, the presence of dreams, forgetting, and sex and the employment of various defense mechanisms invite a Freudian reading of the novel. By looking at how the narrator in Edgar Calabia Samar’s Eight Muses of the Fall deals with his thoughts and experiences, we can gain insights about Daniel’s psyche and perhaps make inferences about how the country handles its own experiences.
Evidently, there are several sex scenes in the novel. Although these incidents seem unimportant to the plot—if there is one in the novel—these are important in examining the narrator’s psyche because sex is one of the basic drives within a person (qtd. in Feist and Feist 31). In Freud’s psychoanalytic theory, the sexual drive is the urge to …show more content…
in Feist and Feist 36). When he recognizes that his experiences do not add up to a simple, coherent narrative and he cannot ascertain his own identity, as if his identity is only imagined and can never be real, he starts talking about his experiences as a newborn (Samar 129, 132). Even his supposed experiences as a newborn baby, however, are filled with unpleasant feelings, which lead him to think that perhaps babies fail to remember their experiences as newborns because their experiences were “so painful that [they] have to forget them to be able to go on with life” (Samar
Evidently, there are several sex scenes in the novel. Although these incidents seem unimportant to the plot—if there is one in the novel—these are important in examining the narrator’s psyche because sex is one of the basic drives within a person (qtd. in Feist and Feist 31). In Freud’s psychoanalytic theory, the sexual drive is the urge to …show more content…
in Feist and Feist 36). When he recognizes that his experiences do not add up to a simple, coherent narrative and he cannot ascertain his own identity, as if his identity is only imagined and can never be real, he starts talking about his experiences as a newborn (Samar 129, 132). Even his supposed experiences as a newborn baby, however, are filled with unpleasant feelings, which lead him to think that perhaps babies fail to remember their experiences as newborns because their experiences were “so painful that [they] have to forget them to be able to go on with life” (Samar