According to Jung, the individuation process is a spiritual transformation through which the individual attains the maturity of his personality. This process requires the incorporation of subconscious material to the conscious life. The unconscious, though personal, is according to the famous psychologist full of images and archetypes that conform what Jung called the “collective unconscious”, which transcends the personal and expands inter-culturally through time and space. This is the perspective used in the present study of Soldados de Salamina (2001), a novel by the Spanish writer Javier Cercas. The hero of this story that combines fiction and reality travels from the present time into the past of his country, the Spanish Civil war, with the purpose of understanding. This immersion in time parallels another one in his psyche through which he deepens into the collective unconscious of the Spanish people. As a result, we have the vital, spiritual and psychological voyage of a man that stars the narration from a chaotic state to finally emerge innerly renovated and mature. By virtue of this transformation, we witness the hero’s process of individuation. Soldados de Salamina returns to the mystery of the ix unconscious and becomes the narration of a voyage of a human being from his deepest psyche, both as a universal and a particular man, towards his conscience. Comprehension is ultimately the engine of a novel that revisits the Spanish past in order to heal inner wounds.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:UMASS/oai:scholarworks.umass.edu:theses-1992 |
| Date | 01 January 2007 |
| Creators | Del Pozo Ortea, Marta |
| Publisher | ScholarWorks@UMass Amherst |
| Source Sets | University of Massachusetts, Amherst |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | text |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Source | Masters Theses 1911 - February 2014 |
Page generated in 0.0021 seconds