Psychological Deficiencies of the Invaders in John Steinbeck’s The Moon is Down

Abstract

This research paper analyses John Steinbeck’s novel The Moon is Down in order to show how invaders come under psychological threat by the strong bond of invaded people. It applies theoretical concept of trauma of Freud, Cathy Caurth, Jeffry Alexander and Susana Radstone to explore how a peaceful country is overrun by the invader, and their mission goes wrong due to the unification among the invaded people. The reasons of falling rule of conquering government are: underestimating the power of the town people, threat to democrat government, and autocratic ruling. Analogously the invaders are compared with Nazi army and the town people are compared with victimized European in order to show the defeat of invaders. Finally, overwhelming resistance of town people leads invader in psychological deficiency. Keywords: trauma, latency, resistance, identity crises, power domination, invasion, and underestimation.