“A Burglar's Christmas”
Punishing hunger occasions the Willie’s scrupulous self-analysis. Cather expounds, “He was miserable enough to want to be quite alone. Even the crowd that jostled by him annoyed him. He wanted to think about himself. He had avoided this final reckoning with himself for a year now. He had laughed it off and drunk it off. But now, when all those artificial devices which are employed to turn our thoughts into other channels and shield us from ourselves had failed him, it must come. Hunger is a powerful incentive to introspection.” Psychoanalytically, the Willie has been indisputably Avoidant of his despicable existence. He was cognizant of his historical specious verdicts; he ultimately resorted to inebriation to intoxicate his conscience. Perhaps, if Willie were physiologically gratified, he would not be meditative. The hunger is an unconditional trigger that acquaints him of his past off-beam judgments.
Besides, the Willie submits to Regression as a result of tremendous hunger: “Tonight was his birthday, too. There seemed something particularly amusing in that. He turned up a limp little coat collar to try to keep a little of the wet chill from his throat, and instinctively began to remember all the birthday parties he used to have. He was so cold and empty that his mind seemed unable to grapple with any serious question. He kept thinking about gingerbread and frosted cakes like a child. He could remember the splendid birthday parties his mother used to give him, when all the other little boys in the block came in their Sunday clothes and creaking shoes, with their ears still red from their mother's towel, and the pink and white birthday cake, and the stuffed olives and all the dishes of which he had been particularly fond, and how he would eat and eat and then go to bed and dream of Santa Claus.” The Regression is a psychological modus operandi that sanctions him to defy his present hunger. Although the reminiscences of hunger-free birthdays cannot bodily placate him, they assuage his unconscious nostalgia for nourishment and affection. Willie’s quandary encumbers him from savouring the ecstasy of his birthday; instead, he is grappling with fatal hunger. Unconsciously, he would like to pamper himself like he used to before he converted into a vagabond.
“The Bookkeeper's Wife”
Before the nuptials, Percy Bixby equates Stella Brown to a gold-like conquest: “As they bent over the lists she had made of things needed, Percy glanced at her face. She was very much out of her sisters' class and out of his, and he kept congratulating himself on his nerve. He was going in for something much too handsome and expensive and distinguished for him, he felt, and it took courage to be a plunger. To begin with, Stella was the sort of girl who had to be well dressed. She had pale primrose hair, with tones in it, very soft and fine, so that it lay smooth however she dressed it, and pale-blue eyes, with blond eyebrows and long, dark lashes. She would have been a little too remote and languid even for the fastidious Percy had it not been for her hard, practical mouth, with lips that always kept their pink even when the rest of her face was pale.” This egoistical surveillance conjectures that the courtship is not instituted to unaffected affection. Percy pursues Stella to enchant his ego for capturing a sophisticated woman’s heart; therefore, he adulates the calibre embodies.
Under Lacanian psychoanalysis, Stella Brown is Percy Bixby’s model objet petit a. Percy Bixby’s measly remuneration corroborates that he is neither elite nor affluent: “Percy spent a night of torment, lying tense on his bed in the dark, and figuring out how long it would take him to pay back the money he was advancing to himself. Any fool could do it in five years, he reasoned, but he was going to do it in three. The trouble was that his expensive courtship had taken every penny of his salary. With competitors like Charley Greengay, you had to spend money or drop out. Certain birds, he reflected ruefully, are supplied with more attractive plumage when they are courting, but nature had n't been so thoughtful for men.” Accordingly, espousing Stella Brown unconsciously enthused by the delusion of being tasteful and flush through connection with a woman who personifies material luxury. Percy Bixby disregards his instincts when he purposefully fabricates his financial grade for his unconscious end of sophistication is incorrigible. Correspondingly, Stella Brown is an avaricious woman who quits her matrimonial when she extricates that they have been persisting of unsanctionable debts. The matrimony irrevocably relapses due to Stella and Percy’s injurious, clashing outlooks.
