Failure of Sublimation in Walker Percy’s Love in the Ruins

Abstract

pplying Freudian insight of sublimation as a theoretical tool to analyze the career of the main character in the novel, the present research work entitled “Failure of Sublimation in Walker Percy‟s Love in the Ruins” attempts to evince that the protagonist of the novel Thomas More, despite having the plenitude of psychic energy traceable in him mainly through the presence of overbearing libidinal urges, is unable to establish himself as a „genius‟ because he fails, in his amateur and light-hearted efforts and pretended willingness, to sublimate the aforesaid libidinal desires into the socially beneficial and scientifically innovative goal of inventing and employing an instrument he calls lapsometer, a kind of stethoscope with which he aimed but with no avail to cure the escalating psychological traumas of the American citizen