“YILAN”DA EROS VE THANATOS ÇATIŞMASI

Abstract

John Steinbeck’s well-known short story “The Snake” is generally accepted as a mysterious work whose motivations and message are unknown simply because the author declares so. Steinbeck relates that the event narrated in the story actually happened and he simply put the incident in words just as it happened. Both the readers and the critics have mostly accepted Steinbeck’s explanation and did not question it. However, a Freudian investigation of the short story reveals that the piece is a well-thought and well-crafted work that demonstrates the collision of life and death instincts, i.e., Eros and Thanatos. Consequently, the present paper first aims to explicate Freud’s arguments on life and death instincts and then illustrate how the action of the characters, as depicted in the short story, are clearly associated with the life and death instincts. In a number of works, Freud postulates that human beings are driven by two dominant instincts, one directing the individual towards enjoyment of life and communal life, and one towards aggression and destruction, each of which are symbolized by Eros and Thanatos respectively. The female character in “The Snake” is dominantly controlled by Thanatos as she asks a biologist to sell her a venomous rattlesnake and feed the snake a rat. She satisfies her erotic and aggressive desires by watching the killing act while the male character, a man of Eros by profession and inclination, is appalled both by the act and the woman. Thus, the short story turns out to be a realm of the collision between Eros and Thanatos. When read under this light, the short story, unlike what most readers think, is not mysterious at all.