Frank OConnor’s “My Oedipus Complex” Essay Example
Frank OConnor’s “My Oedipus Complex” Essay Example

Frank OConnor’s “My Oedipus Complex” Essay Example

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  • Pages: 2 (451 words)
  • Published: April 26, 2017
  • Type: Essay
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Our narrator Larry is completely unreliable as a narrator.

  The entire “essay” is being told from the point of view of a child, and yet is very clearly written by an adult.  The writer would have us believe that the child is actually telling this story, and yet it is completely unbelievable.  First of all, no child that young would have the cognitive abilities nor the ability to think in such an introspective and self-analytical manner.  Most adults barely can.

  To try to pass this off as being a child’s writing, or at least being the thought processes of a child, is ridiculous.  Yes, a child might be able to recognize that he wants Mommy’s attention back, and he might even recognize that he’s angry at Daddy about something.  But no child would have this kind of self-awareness, much less th

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e apparent theoretical background, to form his thoughts in this pattern that so closely echoes the Freudian “Oedipus Complex.”Which brings me to my next point: the writer of this essay clearly has knowledge of what the Oedipus Complex is…no young child would know this.  The story of this essay so closely mimics the boiled-down, oversimplified concept of the Oedipus Complex that it appears as if the author intentionally set out to do so.  However, while the writer clearly has knowledge of the Oedipus Complex, it is not a commanding one.

  In this essay, our young narrator more or less calls out the Oedipus Complex without actually coming out and saying the words—recognizing his own jealousy, obsessing over competing with his father for his mother’s attention, saying he wants to marry his mother, and all in

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a very self-aware way—which misses Freud’s entire point of what the Oedipus Complex actually is.  It is commonly understood as “Boy wants to kill his father and marry his mother,” which is quite literally the story we’re given here.  Yet the theory is much more complex than that, and the child displaying this “Complex” would most certainly have no cognitive awareness of it—THAT is the very nature of the Complex, that it does remain latent.So, we have an essay/story here purportedly in the voice of a young child, clearly written with the awareness and knowledge of an adult, and clearly written with the agenda of miming the Oedipus Complex.  All of these factors together contribute to the utter unreliability of the narrator—he is unreliable because he is completely unbelievable.

  No amount of suspension of disbelief could lead to any reader accepting this narrator as a reliable source, and no reader could really believe that the voice is that of a child’s.

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