The Potential Self As Brotherly Enemy
The Potential Self As Brotherly Enemy

Summary/Abstract: Poe’s 1839 “The Fall of the House of Usher”, Cheever’s 1951 “Goodbye, My Brother”, Baldwin’s 1957 “Sonny’s Blues”, and Updike’s 1964 “The Christian Roommates” belong together here in terms of their re-configuration of the Cain-and-Abel theme of the “brotherly enemy”; this “impossible dream of brotherly love ”is treated as a religious/family topic, as confrontations between the protagonists and their demons, as psychoanalytical aspects of the double or split personality, as projections of/into the variously similar setting, as autobiographical re-tellings of personal experiences and obsessions, or as the problematic relationship between writer and reader. This final major assumption is not really developed and remains at that stage, i.e. as a premise to be considered some other time.

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