THE PSYCHOLOGICAL PORTRAIT OF JUDAS ISCARIOT IN THE SHORT STORY BY DAZAI OSAMU “AN URGENT APPEAL”

Olena Heorhiyivna Horoshkevych, ogoroshkevych@gmail.com

senior teacher of the Department of Oriental Studies

named after prof. Yaroslav Dashkevych

Ivan Franko National University of Lviv

DOI: https://doi.org/10.17721/StudLing2024.24.42-55

PDF (UKRAINIAN)

ABSTRACT

The article analyzes the psychological portrait of Judas Iscariot, drawn by a Japanese writer of the 20th century Dazai Osamu in the short story “An Urgent Appeal”. We see the goal of this article in revealing the features of the author`s psychoanalytic of this image. Methods of contextual analysis, comparative analysis, biographical and hermeneutic analysis were used. The reasons for the author`s appeal to Christian themes and biblical images are considered$ peculiarities of the narrative of the work$ intertextual connections of the work with the texts of the Gospels; reception of the work in Japanese literary discourse. According to the form of the narrative, it is the confession of one hero, presented as a stream of feverish consciousness driven to insanity. The narrative of the story has a frame structure: the dotted frame is the address of the narrator (Judas Iscariot) to someone who has the authority to seize and punish Jesus; embedded stories – scene from the Bible and their perception by Judas. In a feverish confession full of contradictions, the reader is presented with a character with a narcissistic grandeur complex who is driven to crime by the maddened passions raging in his soul. The tragic mode of the work can be seen in the analysis of the character’s obsession, the depiction of his pathological mental state.

That is, the understanding of the archetype of the traitor in the story of Dazai Osamu takes the form of a psychoanalytic analysis: the tragedy of an ordinary person is described, who found himself next to someone whose greatness and nature of this greatness he could not understand.

Prospects for further research can be seen in the analysis of Christian motifs and images in other works of Dazai Osamu. As well as in the analysis of the intertextual component in the works of this autor.

Keywords: archetypal image, psychological image, psychological detail, intertextual connections, psychological portrait of a character

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