Unconscious Resistance Against Althusserian Ideology in Tobias Wolff’s Short Story Bullet in the Brain in the Light of Raymond Williams and Terry Eagleton

Abstract

This paper discusses individual’s determinism caused by ideology; in fact, it is an attempt to show how people in a society are under the influence of the ideology and how these different forms of ideology change people’s view toward life and thus change their whole lives. Being doomed to live and think in a way that ideology requires a subject, or being trapped and therefore living in a world like that of stories are other notions which are talked over in this paper. Deterministic or non-deterministic panorama toward the ideological world of the characters in “Bullet in the Brain” a short story by Tobias Wolff is the work under analysis by the researchers. As the first step, the researchers have identified the ideologies governing the given story. The second step to take was to find traces of resistance toward those power(s) subjected to individuals by the dominant ideology in the society portrayed by the writer of the story. The core fact that makes such a research a novel one is the fact that the form of resistance studied in this story is not a conscious one; although getting its roots from the conscious world of ideas, the whole process of movement against the ideology takes place unintentionally after a drastic change in existence of the protagonist of the short story.

Key words: Ideology; Althusserian or ideological individual; Subject; Hegemony; Resistance; Natural and normal