Inspecting Core Issues of Male Protagonists in ‘The Runaways’ by Fatima Bhutto: A Freudian Psychoanalytic Study

Abstract

The present article aims at studying how the psychological experiences of a person when triggered by various social, sociological, and financial factors serve as a wake-up call for core issues, especially for the young generation being radicalized. While the manifest content of the text, The Runaways by Fatima Bhutto, suggests that the causes of radicalization are poverty, identity crisis, and alienation, this research significantly studies that apart from these sociological causes there are certain personal psychological factors involved. These psychological factors are core issues like fear of abandonment, low self-esteem, unstable sense of self, and fear of life. These core issues are the cause of why the male protagonists, of the novel, despite belonging to different geographical regions and having different life experiences, ended up in the same extremist organization. Theoretical insights of this research have been drawn from Freudian Psychoanalytic theory. The methodology used involves closed text reading in the light of the Freudian Psychoanalytic Theory. The research concludes that both the male protagonists are neurotic having an unconscious obsession with the fears and core issues.