Richard Cory BookRags | Criticism

This literature criticism consists of approximately 11 pages of analysis & critique of Richard Cory BookRags.

Richard Cory BookRags | Criticism

This literature criticism consists of approximately 11 pages of analysis & critique of Richard Cory BookRags.
This section contains 3,080 words
(approx. 11 pages at 300 words per page)
Buy the Critical Essay by Jerome Kavka

SOURCE: “Richard Cory's Suicide: A Psychoanalyst's View,” in Colby Library Quarterly, Vol. 11, No. 3, September, 1975, pp. 150-59.

In the following essay, Kavka responds to Charles A. Sweet's essay on “Richard Cory” with a diagnosis: “Richard Cory” (see above) is the portrait of a narcissist with borderline personality disorder.

What prompts me, as a psychoanalyst, to interpret [Edwin Arlington] Robinson's famous poem, “Richard Cory,” is the intriguing thesis of Charles A. Sweet, Jr. that the poem is a depiction of an oedipal conflict with the suicide a realization of regicidal wishes.1 While psychologically plausible, Sweet's theory is not sufficiently capacious to account for Cory's disastrous deed or his highly unusual personality.

According to Sweet, Cory comes down town as a “Promethean figure bringing the word of the necessity of human communication for survival.” The townspeople are passive and have erected a silent barrier around themselves; they fail to “approach him...

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This section contains 3,080 words
(approx. 11 pages at 300 words per page)
Buy the Critical Essay by Jerome Kavka
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Critical Essay by Jerome Kavka from Gale. ©2005-2006 Thomson Gale, a part of the Thomson Corporation. All rights reserved.