IDENTITY CONFUSION IN DOROTHY WEST’S THE LIVING IS EASY

Abstract

Literature is a media for conveying the authors’ ideas and feelings to the payers, or it is a mean of relief for them to bare their souls. In this context, literature involves an enormous place in human life. In this regard, African American literature has an important place in American literature and culture. It is also one of the strongest pillars of the literature produced by black writers in the United States of America. African American literature goes and continues in the course of history as oral literature from generation to generation. Since African Americans’ place changes gradually in the USA- due to racism in particular- their viewpoint of literature changes, too. African American history predates the foundation of the United States of America as an independent country, so their literature has deep roots, consisting of rich oral culture in poetry, including gospel music, blues, rap, and spirituals along with written poetry, and slave narrations. Although African Americans come from slave ancestors, they have been able to leave a deep effect on the literature of the United States when they are brought to the continent of America. African American literature is mainly based on autobiographical spiritual narratives, and before the American Civil War African Americans’ literature consists of memoirs of people who escape from slavery. So, African American literature has witnessed the problem of racial discrimination in its existential aspect. But in the progress of time, black writers go deep into verbal literature and perform their own experiences. Dorothy West, in her novel Living is Easy criticizes the blacks who mimes the whites. When we scrutinize, it is possible to penetrate that the writer wants to reflect her own experiences via narration and criticizes her own past. Writing is a kind of purgation for West since she writes about herself. In this study, we aim to point out the impulses that foster Dorothy West’s narration from a Freudian point of view.