Jim Hawkins’ needs in Robert Louis Stevenson’s treasure island: Psychological approach

ABSTRACT

A novel always attracts our curiosities. Human beings have already been telling stories as long as they had language and they started writing down as soon as they develop a form of writing. Although they wrote the stories on leafs or other objects. Because at the time still had limited devices to write the story in form of books. Our great-grandparent also tells us the stories by oral while we are lying down or before we are going to sleep. Literature presents people or human, culture and tradition. Literature introduces us to a new world of experience and also we will know cultures of some places through literature.

Thus, this study is aimed to know how Jim Hawkins as the main character faces the situation in the novel “Treasure Island”. Then, to achieve the goals the researcher of this thesis which involves two statements of problems: What are Jim Hawkins’ psychological needs reflected in Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island? and What is the most dominant need of Jim Hawkins appearing in Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island?. Beside that the researcher uses theory of human motivation by Abraham Maslow. The theory is suitable to be used in this research, because this research will describe psychological condition of the main character on novel “Treasure Island”. The contains of this novel is related much with psychological approach.

This study is literary criticism applying psychological approach to deal with the data. The data are collected from original texts of Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island. The approach is to find out the aspect of the main character’s needs in the novel “Treasure Island” by Robert Louis Stevenson and elaborate the psychological theory of Abraham Maslow’s five hierarchies of needs. In collecting the data, researcher has some techniques; the first is reading and understanding the novel. After that is reading chapter by chapter, and then investigating to choose the data dealing with the problems. And the last is marking all statements from the novel which are related to the problems of the study.

Finally, as the result in the research are the researcher finds some proves about Jim Hawkins as the main character includes in the five hierarchies of needs, and that is true that Jim needs in the voyage are really required. Safety need is the need which the most dominant than the other needs. The journey is to look for buried treasure. Therefore, not only Jim crews wish to get it but also every person in this world because glory will make their life better. Moreover it was a pirate period. Indeed some of crews were betrayal.