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ABSTRACT. Life Is Elsewhere is a reflective introspection into the life of a young poet and of his demanding mother. Kindera depicts the mother as a woman feeling unworthy of love who relishes the fantasy of being Jaromil's ethereal mother in order to escape from her actual bodily deprivation and resolve her psychological tensions. On the other hand, Jaromil's portrait as a young poet involves his consonant, in Lacan's terms, imaginary and symbolic identifications which lead him to an unending alienation in the context of a socialist system. Reading the novel in the light of Bakhtin's ideas on parody and its polyphonic nature illuminates Kundera's parodic treatment of motherhood, poetic, political and historical discourses, and especially his use of parody as a political means to oppose the domineering voice of totalitarianism. However, by giving parody an ontological status, Kundera considers it as the inevitable destiny of a human being who has forgotten his authentic "being" and ignored all his existential possibilities opened up to realization. Applying this notion to Kundera's relation to his characters, Jaromil and the middle-aged man, implies that these two characters are, in fact, the parody of the two stages of Kundera's own life and that of his generation's.

The prevailing motifs of Auster's literary oeuvre such as chance, contingent events, writing and the binary opposition of reader and author are also noticeable in Paul Auster's Invisible; however, in this article, we examine the novel in terms of the characters' psychological attempts to form their different identifications within Lacanian theoretical framework. Born acts as both reified big Other and object petit a for Walker, while Walker, in his different encounters with Born, experiences disparate Zizekian parallax views. Holding such views, Walker stands in the middle of the various courses of subjectivities, thereby undergoing a complicated interwoven subjectivity. Furthermore, Born's encounters with the Real, epitomized in Born, place him in the two concurrent positions of subjectivities both in the Imaginary and the Symbolic order. As a result, his constant Symbolic identifications with signifying traits of Born's bring him nothing but an aporia of logical perplexities. Last but not the least, we emphasize that the fluctuation between lost object and the loss itself, as an object, plums the depth of the anxieties embedded in such interwoven subjectivity.

With the recent inclination toward reading for ideological aspects of his works, Nabokov, who had been pervasively regarded as a mere ingenious aesthete, both during his life and for a long time after his death, has proved more puzzling in interpretation than what scholars believed. In this research, in order to understand what concept of freedom Nabokov has developed in his Bend Sinister, we focus on the two of his salient concerns: reality and individuality. Consequently, our narratological reading of Bend Sinister is concentrated first on the interpretation of the whatness of reality and its contribution to realize freedom, and second on analyzing the significance of retaining individuality to procure freedom; ultimately, out of delving into these two issues, the concept of freedom that the narrative techniques of the novel render, in correspondence to the peculiarities of the mid-twentieth century, is found out. Regarding the notion of the reality, in this novel, the unremitting propaganda of the totalitarian system presented the materialistic world as the ultimate truth, confining citizens in the prison of a fake world and not permitting them to gain the slightest awareness of the endless freedom possible in eternity. As to the individuality, Krug’s attempts not to succumb to the desired system of padograph lead him to maintain his individuality and partly realize his freedom of mind. And finally, it is shown how totalitarianism has reached such absolute power that no thorough freedom of mind is now conceivable for humanity.

ABSTRACT. Beckett, as a typical modern author, adopts a position between subjectivity and objectivity, and in the gap between these two, by focusing on the latter on one hand, represents an image of Lukacs's realistic view and on the other hand, by scrutinizing more precisely, offers a profile of the existentialist view. Beckett's presence itself in this gap inevitably entails a critical representation of both realms. His characters, in confrontation with modern subjectivization, seek refuge to the fragmented reified objectivity leading to desubjectivization, which is in line with Beckett's characters' anxiety and angst of thinking about their existential how-ness. Meanwhile, their denying the past is synonymous with negating Dasein's temporality features, and this ends in the dissolution of their most primary existential feature, projection. The concomitance of these features eventuates in the appearance of characters such as Vladimir and Estragon who evade thinking like a modern subject, that is, a kind of thinking which revolves around a transcendental signified.