- How does Brooks describe the role of beginnings and endings in narrative? How does this purely literary relationship map onto our psyche, onto our inner life? Why, in other words, does Brooks say, that “all narration is obituary”?
- Why is it, according to Freud (via Brooks), that every narration is a repetition? What are some of the concrete examples that Freud gives of narration as repetition?
- Prior to Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Freud had assumed that we are primarily motivated by pleasure, by satisfying primal appetites for food, comfort, and sex or, more abstractly, secondary appetites for positive regard, love, revenge, etc. So how does Freud explain the urge to revisit traumatic, unpleasant experiences through narrative?
- How does Freud’s claim that “the aim of all life is death” relate to narrative form? How, in other words, are narrative plots like life itself?
- How does the fundamental structure of plot—beginning + middle + end—answer a fundamental psychological need? What makes a good, satisfying plot, and how does our intuitive sense of good/bad plots illuminate our psychic makeup?
- Are plots doomed to die in the end? How, for Brooks, so some narratives cheat death, so to speak?
- What kind of literary criticism emerges from Freud’s “master plot”? How does it differ from other versions of psychoanalytic criticism?
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