![]() It is also explained as “the drive to experience, to love, to learn and to grow – the instinctual life force that Freud termed the libido” (Arundale, 453). In other words, humans will go to untold lengths to satisfy their sexual and human needs as a whole. When Freud is asked to describe what is at the base of the libido, he explains that “The pleasure principal long persists…as the method of working employed by the sexual instincts, which are so hard to ‘educate’, and, starting from those instincts, or in the ego itself, it often succeeds in overcoming the reality principle, to the detriment of the organism as a whole” (Freud, 4). Wolff’s stories are distillations of these motivations and the conflicts between them. Sigmund Freud hypothesized that the two most basic drives in all of mankind are the Libido and Thanatos: the will towards life, sex, and high living and the fascination with death, destruction, and entropy. ![]() Tobias Wolff’s The Night in Question follows in this time honored tradition, mimicking humanity’s most basic drives and desires. ![]() Art shows life in a distilled and refined vision, life perfectly encapsulated in a painting, sculpture, or short story. Lucius Annaeus Seneca once said that “All art is but imitation of nature” (Bartlett’s 106) and this has held true for the centuries following him, nature and life reflected in the art and literature of its time. ![]()
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