The Destructive Role of the Unconscious in Khalid Hosseini’s And The Mountains Echoed

الملخص

This paper is about the role of the unconscious, a psychoanalytic concept, in shaping the life of Abdullah in Khaled Hosseini’s And The Mountains Echoed. This study simply examines the destructive effect the unconscious does possess on the lives of human beings and how it is strong enough to ruin and dominate people’s life, if not controlled by the unconscious, from the beginning till the end, as in Abdullah’s case. The main two characters in And The Mountains Echoed suffer from some forced separation and loss of interconnectedness, the ghost of which haunts the life of poor Abdullah leading him to live an irritable and unstable life.  This study proves that the unconscious can recall and interact with repressed memories when time and life could have by far erased and healed wounds left by past memories, if fought and accepted, as the human being grows older, wiser and stronger. Yet, the alerted painful memories are activated and start to interact with the present life details and memories. Hence, it is difficult for the human being to separate past from present as this leads to living the painful past events once again but with the older version of the self.