Depression in Adam Haslett’s Imagine Me Gone:

Abstract

This thesis is an examination and a detailed interpretation of the characters of Adam Haslett’s novel Imagine Me Gone (2016), in which he focuses on the inner side of them and the family struggles with mental illness and the chronic depression. Thus, it will look at the characters’ behaviors and actions, using Sigmund Freud’s and Lacan’s Psychoanalytic criticism theories, which explain how humans have unconscious struggles and repressed thoughts, which affect their behaviors and that they should be analyzed in order to understand those behaviors. The author, with his great way of capturing the different inner worlds of his characters, focuses on his main character, who inherits his father’s severe depression. The paper, therefore, will explain how depression affects the characters and how it prevents them from having a normal life within the family and with the outside world.