Why Did I Choose This Lens? - Rodrigo Cuevas Kells

The reason I chose the psychoanalytical lens is because understanding how and why someone either acts or thinks a certain way based on mentality or past experiences is extremely interesting to me. To me being able to understand a person's way of being, how they tick in a sense is very important because you are able to understand why they act or are a certain way. Most of the time it's from traumatic experiences that occurred in someone's past that cause them to have some forms of barriers from having block those things from their minds. Another example would be how sometimes people have a ritual like thing that they always remember to do. If you are run over while jaywalking odds are you're not going to jay walk again because of that traumatic experience or be more cautious about doing that. The other topics seem too 2-dimensional, not really any depth to those forms of analysis. With psychoanalytical it about people, not ideas or ways of a time period, but of the mental state of a character, that pulls me in more into this lens than any other. My personal experience with this topic is fairly simple, none. I have never gone out of my way to spend lots of time analyzing a character's thoughts, actions, speech patterns, mental state, opinions on certain subjects or anything of that matter. It's mostly just been me realizing these are things while watching TV or movies but never from books. I hope that through this project that I will be able to fully explain and give a rational explanation for a character's actions and thoughts throughout the book. Be able to understand why Sethe, Paul D, Denver and Beloved act the way they do, think the way they do, speak the way they do. Be able to pick apart a character's brain through direct and indirect characterization throughout the novel. To have the knowledge and analytical skill capable of taking note of a character's movements described in the story and explain why they move in that format. These are the kinds of things that will help me in real life understanding why a person has a certain point of view on a subject and how their past may be mapped or accurately guessed to certain events that explain the belief. This is a type of skill that unlike most of the other lenses can be extremely applicable to real life situations. When you get into a heated argument with someone you can better understand from what side they are coming from and why they feel passionate about a certain subject by noticing small mannerisms that they have. This is a skill that helps with the real world and literature world, real life by understanding another person and literature by getting a deeper understanding of the characters and their past and present.