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James Jones’s second war trilogy, “The Thin Red Line” (1962), sketches the comic cycle of infantrymen undeterred by the relentless battles of Guadalcanal. In the name of bravery, Jones’s characters refuse to suffer by veiling their cowardice, insecurities, and anxieties under a burst of nervous laughter. In his mission to offer a verisimilar description of the Pacific struggle, Jones interrupts the bleak realism of his literary canon by carnivalesque episodes of combat festivals filled with tough humor at the act of killing and the spectacle of death. The aim behind this technique is to ridicule the tedious routine of military life, in particular, and war, in general. Most importantly, his narrative style conceals through laughter the traumas of his soldiers by offering a temporary therapy to their combat stress. Thus, “The Thin Red Line” does not only show Jones’s antiwar stance but also his endeavor to create characters who repress their anxieties to resist the pain inflicted by a higher order.

This paper examines Dan Millman's standpoint toward the Freudian pleasure principle through a psychoanalytic reading of Way of the Peaceful Warrior (1980). It aims at exploring the central character's source of dissatisfaction and the driving force that motivates him to overcome life obstacles. While Freud holds that Man's main motivation in life is pleasure, Millman shows that following the hedonistic drive does not guarantee happiness. He leans toward the Franklian perspective in advocating meaning as the central driving force for humans. Millman's protagonist could survive his 'existential vacuum' only when opting for a conscious change of attitude.

The present paper explores the concept of confession and its genealogical development as articulated by Michel Foucault's work and portrayed in both Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter and Roth's Indignation. By comparing and contrasting confessional practices in the selected novels, this study aims to highlight how the distinct definitions and functions assigned to confession exist within both religious and secular contexts. In particular, this analysis seeks to shed light on how religious confession rites have evolved into an important technology for knowledge production and, ultimately, the exercise of power in the secular age. This study eventually demonstrates the importance of the protagonists' social and cultural understanding of confession, as well as the way these understandings shape both Hester's and Marcus's experience with it.