Identity Alienation in Literature

Abstract

Alienation is a familiar theme in the prose of Ismail Kadare and Kuteli Mitrush. This theme is defined as an emotional isolation or detachment from others, a way of thinking in exile. In the works of Kuteli and Kadare, the characters are continually alienated and they experience isolation from the society. These characters are physically and psychologically separated from their loved ones. The tough conditions of the society are the causes of their isolation. The characters want to hide their identity from a kind of punishment or guilt that can judge or condemn their conscience. The characters’ archetypes appear phantasmagoric, hallucinated and in hypnosis. They are mutilated and demoniac. Alienation stems from a state of despair, disruption of connectivity, a search for escape from the path of death. For Kuteli the weather has changed, the country has changed, the people, their names and clothes have changed. Everything has become strange and the writer feels "a stranger among strangers", "dead among the living”. This alienation has not affected the man’s skin, which has remained the same, but something essential has been changed. His soul, as the core of the body, has migrated feeling better in exile, far from the ordinary life, he feels a stranger in a metamorphosis reality. The equilibrium between the substance that has been alienated and the form that has remained empty, almost barren, looking for the necessary rediscovery of a new identity carried by the human being.

DOI: 10.5901/mjss.2015.v4n1s1p53