CHAPTER I
INTRODUCTION
1.1 Background of the Study
People use language for various purposes in different forms of writing. They discuss and write a variety of issues such as family, politics, environment, women, education and soon. Prose poems, dramas and other literary works use language in written form. They are called literature. R.J. Rees states that literature is a writing which expresses and communicates feelings, thoughts and attitudes toward life (Rees, 1973:2).
Besides the definitions of literature, it is necessary to know why people study literature. There are some reasons that cause people to learn literature. According to Koesnosoebroto (1988): People read literature because of hunger of information or amusement or solace because an appetite for truth that seem to grow by what it feeds on. Men read to discover themselves and their world to asses their special roles in the universe, to learn the meaning of the personal struggles in which they are engaged. In other words, we want to share experience. The same reason is also stated by Rees (1973:13) that the readers study literary works because they want to learn about another country, to appear welleducated, to pass the examination and to make themselves better people.
Based on the opinion above, it can be concluded that literature is not only learnt to get pleasure, but also to gain moral values and to get an exposition to cultural background of a country. Literary works could be in the form of prose, poems and dramas. In this study, the writer focuses on drama, because drama is one of a great work among the others literary works because drama is well known as the simple literary work but has a significance role in people’s life. Most of the stories such as Romeo and Juliet, Hamlet and Othello were meaningful and easy to understand. Drama is the most popular literary work in governments’ life, moreover for the state governments. They preferred to read drama to other literary works, because the majority of drama represented the condition of the politics.
In addition to this, the writer uses drama script as his analysis because he can interpret the dialogues of each character in the dialogues of the drama. From these dialogues, the writer tries to analyze the conflicts among the characters. There are a lot of conflicts mentioned in the story, but the writer is focusing dealing with psychology, especially in psychoanalysis.
From the psychology life, many problems and conflicts will appear to become something which is interesting to be analyzed. In this thesis, the writer chose the main characters as the reflection of the whole characters that are Othello, Iago, Casio and Desdemona. This drama tells about the works of state officials in the government which are trying to bring down each other in order to get the authority.
The writer chose a drama script entitled Othello by William Shakespeare because Othello gives a lot of data which are related to his analysis that is to find out the down fall of the state officials’ authority. It contains psychological conflict among the characters, such as obsession, political temptations and great hesitation. All of those matters are very interesting to be analyzed, because obsession, temptation and hesitation appear from someone’s psychology. Thus, in this study the writer would like to analyze psychological conflicts that emerge in the drama script. In this case the obsessions of the state officials as reflected by the main characters in Othello by William Shakespeare.
1.2 Reason for Choosing the Topic
There are a lot of conflicts that can be explained using the psychoanalysis approach. In this drama, Shakespeare writes intricate story. Actually the main character has the same characteristics as others do, but Shakespeare reflects him as the picture of state officials’ life. Then he shows that the obsessions are viewed as one of the components of personality characteristics. Shakespeare has created the characterization of Othello in a complete description. He shows the deviant behavior of Othello because of similarity environmental factor. Case of Othello’s
