Proceedings of English Linguistics and Literature

The Underground Man’s Defense Mechanism in Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground

Adi Satria Wicaksono — 2026-09-21

This study examines the defense mechanisms experienced by the Underground Man in Fyodor Dostoevsky's Notes from Underground (1864) through a psychoanalytic perspective. The study aims to identify the defense mechanisms used by the protagonist and explain what causes them and how they develop throughout the novel. This study employs a descriptive qualitative method, using textual analysis to examine relevant passages from the novel. The analysis is based on psychoanalytic theory, particularly the concept of defense mechanisms developed by Sigmund Freud and Anna Freud. The findings show that the Underground Man employs several defense mechanisms, including turning against oneself, sublimation, undoing, reaction formation, reversal into its opposite, repression, projection, and displacement. These mechanisms develop in response to psychological conflicts involving humiliation, social rejection, feelings of inferiority, self-loathing, fear of vulnerability, and an unfulfilled desire for human connection. The findings further reveal that although these defense mechanisms temporarily protect the protagonist from psychological anxiety, they also contribute to his isolation, distorted perception of others, negative self-image, and inability to establish genuine relationships. Therefore, the study demonstrates that the Underground Man's defense mechanisms reflect his unresolved psychological conflicts and show how he unconsciously manages anxiety, emotional distress, and difficult experiences throughout the novel.

Exploring Social Discrimination Through Erlok Grael's Behavioral Changes in Ruination Using Saussurean Binary Opposition

Akmal Fathoni Khairul Ihsan — 2026-09-21

This study explores the psychological impact of prolonged social discrimination as depicted in Anthony Reynolds' Ruination (2022), using Ferdinand de Saussure's theory of binary opposition to examine the lowborn character Erlok Grael's exclusion and behavioral transformation. Set against a stratified fantasy society governed by hereditary class hierarchy, the novel reflects real-world patterns of class-based marginalization between the nobility and the lowborn. The research employs a descriptive qualitative method, focusing on close textual analysis to identify discrimination and behavioral change across the novel, particularly in the character of Erlok Grael. The study uses Saussure's concepts of binary opposition to investigate how recurring pairs such as nobility/peasantry, visibility/invisibility, and authority/submission structure Grael's social position and identity. Data were categorized according to these oppositions, which enables thematic interpretation of Grael's exclusion, humiliation, and eventual dehumanization. Findings reveal that Grael's transformation, from unresolved humiliation to circumstantially qualified villainy and ultimately complete dehumanization, mirrors real-world class-based marginalization. This research ultimately offers insight into how fantasy literature can dramatize the psychological consequences of prolonged discrimination as a means of exploring the human cost of social exclusion.

Digory’s personality development in The Magician’s Nephew: A Lacanian psychoanalytic study

Daniella Galuh Rina Hanggana Raras — 2026-09-21

The study examines the influence of closest people’s existence on Digory Kirkey’s personality development in CS. Lewis’s The Magician’s Nephew using Jacques Lacan psychoanalytic theory. The research employs a qualitative descriptive method. The primary data was acquired by reading the novel, while the data was analyzed using three orders of Lacan psychoanalytic which are the imaginary order, symbolic order, and real order. The research’s finding reveals that Digory’s personality is heavily shaped by people around him. Digory makes a choice by thinking about his mother, his uncle, his friend, and Aslan, the ruler of Narnia. Digory was a reckless teenager, but he changed throughout the story. These relationships influence his transition through three orders of Lacan psychoanalytic. The study concludes that the existence of closest people has an impact on Digory’s personality development.

Collective Guilt in Agatha Christie’s Murder on the Orient Express: An Analysis through the Lens of Paul Ricoeur, Hannah Arendt, Branscombe, and Doosje

Muhammad Nediaputra Ardinugroho — 2026-09-21

Murder on the Orient Express, one of Agatha Christie’s famous novels, contains a plot that is uncommon if compared to your typical detective fiction. The novel gives an unusual portrait of collective guilt and the formation of it. This study examines that with the theories of Alexander, Gilbert, Ricoeur, Arendt, and Branscombe and Doosje. Using qualitative approach by analyzing the texts in the book, whether its dialogue, monologue, or storyline that gives a material for analyzing how collective guilt is formed. The formation itself consists of group trauma, collective memory, collective planning, and collective action, and last but not least, collective guilt. The result of it shows that the passengers’ actions reflect a shared responsibility to pursue justice when the law failed to do so. Ricoeur’s ideas of memory demonstrates how collective trauma unites the group, while Branscombe and Doosje’s psychological analysis of guilt reveals the process by which moral burden is distributed. Arendt’s distinction between individual and collective responsibility emphasizes the moral dynamics in the group. This study enhances the exploration of morality and collective ethics in literature and establishes a framework for understanding group decision-making in severe situations.

Writing and the Wallpaper: Suppressed Voice and Epistemic Authority in Charlotte Perkins Gilman's The Yellow Wallpaper

Athaaya Fatin Nuha — 2026-09-21

Charlotte Perkins Gilman's The Yellow Wallpaper (1892) has long been read as a feminist allegory of patriarchal confinement, yet existing readings often treat its subjugation, silencing, and madness as separate motifs rather than parts of a single narrative mechanism. This study addresses that gap by examining how the narrator's writing and the wallpaper's visual pattern function as parallel sites through which her epistemic authority is first suppressed and then reclaimed. Using a qualitative feminist close-reading approach, the study analyzes the primary text alongside Gilman's essay "Why I Wrote The Yellow Wallpaper" (1913) as supporting context, focusing on three interconnected strategies: the narrator's clandestine writing, her husband's gaslighting of her perceptions, and her growing identification with the wallpaper's trapped figure. Findings show these elements form a coherent pattern in which the suppression of the narrator's voice and of her writing are structurally identical, and that her final descent into "madness" paradoxically stages a reclamation of narrative authority. The wallpaper thus functions not merely as a symbol of oppression but as a textual mirror of the narrator's silenced authorship, offering a more integrated account of the story's feminist critique than readings that treat theme and technique separately.

Negotiation of Female Identity in Paris for One and Other Stories by Jojo Moyes

Deffa Anggrea Faras — 2026-09-21

Female identity in contemporary women’s fiction is often examined through representation or final character outcomes, leaving the process that connects social construction, narrative disruption, and agency insufficiently explained. This study investigates how female identities are initially constructed, how they are negotiated, and what meanings emerge from those negotiations in Jojo Moyes’s Paris for One and Other Stories. Using a qualitative interpretive approach, the study combines close reading, purposive textual selection, within-story analysis, and cross-story comparison through Simone de Beauvoir’s existential feminism. The findings show that female identities are initially stabilized through relational labelling, self-silencing, domestic and caregiving responsibilities, material limitations, bodily judgment, and professional misrecognition. The characters negotiate these identities through spatial movement, refusal, verbal articulation, relational repositioning, self-fashioning, mediated performance, professional strategy, and improvisation. These processes do not produce uniform or complete liberation. Instead, the collection represents female identity as situated, relational, and unfinished becoming, in which agency may take the form of departure, reflective recommitment, self-assertion, or the reinterpretation of care. The study contributes a process-oriented Beauvoirian framework that links social sedimentation, disruption, negotiation, and situated freedom beyond binary readings of oppression and empowerment

Exploring the Integration of Technology and Environtment in Peter Brown’s Novel The Wild Robot

Akmalia Rahma Maulina — 2026-09-21

This study examines the integration of technology and nature in Peter Brown’s novel The Wild Robot (2016) through two theoretical frameworks: Greg Garrard’s ecocritical concepts of wilderness and dwelling, and Donna Haraway’s cyborg theory. Technology and nature are often seen as two opposing forces that cannot coexist. The rapid development of technology in modern life has raised concern about its impact on the natural environment, leading many people to assume that machines and ecosystems can never truly belong together. Brown’s novel challenges this assumption through the story of Roz, a robot who washes ashore on a wild island and must learn to survive among animals and ecosystems entirely foreign to her design. Using a qualitative descriptive analytical method, this research traces how Roz’s journey from a stranded machine to an active member of the island’s ecosystem reflects both an ecocritical process of learning to dwell responsibly in a place, and Haraway explains the assumption that technology and nature occupy fundamentally separate categories. The findings reveal that Brown’s novel constructs the island not as a wilderness that resists the artificial, but as a living system that reshapes every entity within it regardless of its origin. This study contributes to ecocritical and posthumanist discourse by demonstrating that popular fiction can challenge the deepest assumptions of environmental thought while remaining accessible to diverse audiences.

Grice’s Maxims Flouting and Its Functions in Ernest Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea

Hayya Aulia Wardani — 2026-09-21

This research focuses on analyzing the flouting of Grice's conversational maxims in Ernest Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea. The study aims to identify the types of maxims flouting and examine the functions that each flouted maxim serves in the novel. This research employed a qualitative research method. The data consisted of dialogues containing instances of maxim flouting, which were collected directly from the novel. The data were analyzed using Grice's Cooperative Principle, particularly the four conversational maxims: quantity, quality, relation, and manner. The results reveal that all the four conversational maxims are flouted in the novel. The maxim of quantity is the most flouted maxim among the four maxims. The flouted maxims serve different communicative functions, such as to express optimism, emotional support, perseverance, responsibility and interpersonal closeness. These principles also help in characterization and the development of implied meaning too, reflecting Hemingway’s use of indirect speech as a narrative strategy.

BAD FAITH UNDER TOTALITARIAN REGIMES IN GEORGE ORWELL’S ANIMAL FARM

Muzhaffar Hibatullah — 2026-09-21

This study analyses how the character Boxer in George Orwell’s Animal Farm represents bad faith and how that bad faith constructs identity under a totalitarian regime. Using a qualitative textual analysis grounded in Jean-Paul Sartre’s existentialism, the study focuses on Boxer as the research object, with Animal Farm as the primary data source. Data were gathered through close reading and analysed through data condensation, data display, and conclusion verification. The findings show that Boxer’s bad faith emerges through self-limitation in learning, repeated acceptance of slogans, labour-centred self-imposition, and the postponement of self-development. Despite Boxer occasionally showing moral hesitation and brief recognition of contradiction, these moments remain fragile and do not develop into sustained resistance. The study concludes that the interplay between totalitarian pressure and self-imposed compliance shapes Boxer’s identity. Thus, bad faith functions as a process of existential self-construction rather than a single act of obedience. The study contributes to existentialist literary criticism by expanding existentialist literary criticism to identify identity development under totalitarian conditions.

Women’s Objectification: Gender Inequality in Min Jin Lee’s Pachinko

Nida Milata Hanifa — 2026-09-21

This study examines how women are represented as objects in Pachinko by Min Jin Lee, how women’s objectification reflects gender inequality, and what the impacts of women’s objectification are. This study employs a qualitative descriptive method and draws on feminist criticism, particularly on the concept of objectification proposed by Martha Nussbaum (1995) and Rae Langton (2009). This study analyzes Pachinko by Min Jin Lee as the primary source of data, while books and journal articles are used as secondary sources of data to support the analysis. The results of this study show that the objectification of women is experienced by the female characters through seven ways of objectification. This objectification is rooted in gender-based power difference, which makes women treated with less empathy and negatively impacts women’s lives, while also maintaining the practice of objectification itself. This study concludes that the objectification of women is not solely individuals’ misconduct, but also a manifestation of patriarchal gender relations that place women in subordinate positions as objects for men’s purposes.

Female supporting characters and patriarchy in Adichie’s imitation and the arrangers of marriage

Niken Elysia Dwiyanti — 2026-09-21

This study analyzes two short stories written by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Imitation and The Arrangers of Marriage, in which women sustain patriarchal expectations in marriage through their closest relationships. The study aims to examine how female supporting characters normalized patriarchal expectations in marriage and how this normalization affects the way the protagonists understand and negotiate their positions in marriage. Using Bartky’s concept of internalized patriarchy and Kandiyoti’s patriarchal bargain, this research applies a descriptive qualitative approach, utilizing close reading to examine the dialogues, narration, and actions performed by characters within both narratives. The research results show that it is not only men’s authority that creates patriarchal expectations, but also the daily interaction among women. The research also shows that the protagonists actively negotiate their positions within the patriarchal system, rather than completely rejecting it. This study concludes by showing that women can also play a role in reproducing patriarchal expectations with other women.

The Death of Absolute Morality Depicted in Fyodor Dostoyevski’s “Crime and Punishment”

Raka Nadhif Ibrahim — 2026-09-21

Moral absolutism, the belief that certain actions are inherently right or wrong regardless of context, has long been a contested framework in both philosophy and literature. While much of the existing scholarship on Fyodor Dostoyevsky's Crime and Punishment (1866) focuses on its psychological and religious dimensions, relatively few studies have systematically examined how the novel portrays the collapse of moral frameworks through the lens of postmodern theory. This study aims to analyze the ways in which Dostoyevsky depicts the death of absolute morality as manifested in the character of Rodion Raskolnikov, whose self-constructed moral ideology gradually disintegrates throughout the narrative. Employing postmodernism as the primary theoretical framework, particularly Jean-François Lyotard's concept of the collapse of grand narratives and Michel Foucault's notion of power-knowledge in defining moral norms. This study conducts qualitative descriptive research based on close reading of the novel's key scenes, dialogues, and character developments. The findings reveal not only Raskolnikov's ideological breakdown reflects Dostoyevsky's broader critique of enlightenment rationalism but also the dangerous consequences of moral self-sovereignty. Overall, this study contributes to the ongoing discourse on morality in world literature and demonstrates that Crime and Punishment remain a profoundly relevant text for understanding contemporary moral crisis.

Representation of Intense Loneliness Through Speech Acts in White Nights by Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Vita Rizqillah Noza — 2026-09-21

This study aims to explore illocutionary types in White Nights by Fyodor Dostoyevsky and to examine how the illocutionary acts represent intense loneliness experienced by the narrator in the novel using Searle’s Speech Act Theory. This study applies a qualitative descriptive method by analyzing the narrator’s utterances that contain illocutionary acts, which were collected through a close-reading technique. After collecting the data, the researcher categorized the utterances into different types of illocutionary acts. The study found that in White Nights, there are 61 utterances identified as illocutionary acts. They consist of 22 expressive, 19 assertive, 11 directive and 9 commissive, while declarative speech acts were not found within the literary work. In the study, the author categorized each type of these illocutionary acts to identify and examine how they represent the narrator’s intense loneliness. In addition, the narrator’s incapacity to form a relationship, his needs for emotional understanding, fears of being rejected are reflected through each type of illocutionary acts. These findings indicate that speech acts are not only used to identify and interpret the intended meaning behind the character’s utterances but also provides a deeper explanation of how intense loneliness is represented through language use in the literary works.

OPPRESSION AND RESISTANCE IN CELIE'S CHARACTER IN ALICE WALKER'S THE COLOR PURPLE: A BLACK FEMINISM ANALYSIS

Widiyah Rahmawati Putri — 2026-09-21

This study examines the forms of oppression experienced by Celie in novel The Color Purple (1985) by Alice Walker, and her strategies of resistance as analyzed through Black feminist theory. Employing a qualitative literary research design with descriptive-interpretive analysis, this study draws on the theoretical frameworks of Patricia Hill Collins (2000) and bell hooks (2015) to identify and interpret the evidence of interlocking oppression, female solidarity as resistance, and identity reconstruction. The findings reveal that Celie experiences layered oppression encompassing race, gender, and class, as conceptualized through Collins's matrix of domination. Resistance emerges through the cultivation of sisterhood relationships particularly with Shug Avery and Sofia which catalyze Celie's psychological liberation and eventual economic independence.

Women’s Abandonment in Kali Fajardo-Anstine’s Short Stories “Sabrina & Corina" and “Ghost Sickness”

Yulia Harnisa — 2026-09-21

This study investigates the representation of and responses to women's abandonment in Kali Fajardo-Anstine's short stories Sabrina & Corina and Ghost Sickness. Rather than defining abandonment solely as an act of physical separation, this research approaches it from two interconnected perspectives: as a socio-economic condition resulting from the breakdown of family structures and as a form of psychological trauma rooted in early childhood "father hunger." Using a qualitative descriptive method and Simone de Beauvoir's concept of "the Other" as its theoretical framework, the study analyzes how the female protagonists, Sabrina and Ana, negotiate their marginalized identities. The findings demonstrate that abandonment extends beyond the experience of loss, functioning instead as a process of existential erasure in which women are reduced to objectified and subordinate positions within a patriarchal social order.

A Psychological Analysis of Narcissism and Perfectionism in Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray

Anisa Pitria Isabela — 2026-09-21

This study analyzes narcissism and obsession with perfection in Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray through a psychoanalytic perspective. The research aims to identify the internal and external factors influencing Dorian Gray's narcissistic behavior and to examine how narcissism and perfectionism contribute to his moral decline. This study employs a qualitative descriptive method using library research. The primary data source is Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray, while secondary data are obtained from books, journal articles, and previous studies concerning psychoanalysis, narcissism, and perfectionism. The findings reveal that Dorian Gray's narcissistic behavior is shaped by both internal factors—including insecurity, fear of aging, excessive self-admiration, and the desire to maintain an ideal self-image—and external factors, such as Lord Henry's influence, Victorian social values, and the glorification of beauty and pleasure. Furthermore, the interaction between narcissism and perfectionism gradually weakens Dorian's moral judgment, leading to manipulation, violence, and self-destruction. Through Dorian Gray's character, Oscar Wilde criticizes a society that values beauty and external appearance more highly than morality and humanity. The study concludes that excessive narcissism and perfectionism may ultimately result in psychological instability, moral deterioration, and the destruction of personal identity.

The Mechanism of Neocolonialism in Faction System Veronica Roth’s Divergent

Finka Rachmalia — 2026-09-21

Human unawareness of neo-colonialism makes many people become deceived by circumstances that seem to raise them from adversity. This study explores how neocolonialism is reflected in Veronica Roth's novel, Divergent, by analyzing the mechanism of neocolonialism through the faction system. The faction system in Divergent is often examined from the perspective of social control and ideological domination. This research method is descriptive qualitative. It uses Antonio Gramsci's theory of hegemony to analyze how domination is maintained not only through coercion but also through the consent of other groups. Gramsci's concept highlights the role of ideological and cultural control in securing power, which in the context of Divergent is reflected in social norms, faction-based education, and moral values that shape individual behavior. This system simplifies social control by assigning a single quality to each individual to eliminate ambiguity and variation. This type of faction system prevents the emergence of rebels who could disrupt the established order. This is why neocolonialism occurs because they follow the existing rules without resistance. They perceive these as social regulations that they must obey to maintain world security and peace.