Journal oedipus

O’Connor’s captures the voice, thoughts and feelings of child throughout the story. Larry is a child who shows a lot of jealously, hatred and confusion when his father comes home from the war.Oedipus complex is a term used by Sigmund Freud in psychology where a boy develops an obsessive love towards the mother and hatred towards the father. We can identify how Larry behaves to get hismother attention back and how he constantly try to awake his father up, fights with him and in one occasion Larry indicates that he wants to marry his mother.
The father is characterized in thestory as a very dedicated man to the war and his job, nut less interesting to Larry because he symbolizes competition to get his mother attention and love. Meanwhile the mother represented love,attention, sympathy, and safety but throughout the events of the story the boy starts repressing her mother for giving all the attention to the poor daddy and then to the new baby.
The titlerepresents the constant fight between him and his father for the attention of the mother. Larry was a boy who lived his entire life with his mother and doesn’t know well his father because he was in thewar his entire childhood. Oedipus complex symbolizes Larry story of the boy who is obsesses with his mother and hates his father like Sigmund Freud analyze the term of Oedipus complex. I think thestory would not have the same meaning if told in third person because the story is told by the perspective of a child, but thinks and acts like an adult. In some point is very funny and strange toread a story like this.
Some social and cultural values showed in the story are once again how woman are at home taking care of the child while their husbands is working to bring money for them.At one point in the story you can see that they were poor because the mother tells that as unlike the Geney’s family they can afford another baby. Once again we see how woman are repressed.