A Psychological analysis of Luke Chandler's personality in A Painted House by John Grisham

ABSTRACT

This is a literary study seen from psychological aspects. We all know that the literature reflects the life of human beings. It is concerned with thoughts, feelings, behaviors, or attitudes. Through literature, especially novel, we can enrich and enlarge our experience and interpretation of life. It presents different types of personalities, which is shown through the description of its character’s expressions. The personalities of the characters are mostly recognized by the use of the emotional expressions. This thesis tries to find out the types of personalities included in this novel. There are physical, intellectual, emotional, social, aspiration and achievement, sexual, education, and family factors. Furthermore, to describe the psychological analysis on Luke Chandler’s personality related to his emotion, it is shown based on his performance of emotional balance, emotional control, and emotional stress including anxiety, frustration jealousy and envy.

The writer explains about the method of the study. She obtains and collects all the data by finding the book used as sources of this study, recording, selecting and picking the data, then arranging it systematically in accordance with the problems of the study. To corroborate the data, triangulation is used in this study. The writer decide to use triangulations of data sources and methodological triangulation.

The data are presented, discussed or analyzed and concluded. The description of Luke Chandler’s aspects of personality are based on his performance including in this novel, such as intellectual, Luke could differentiate which one that he had to do for the importance of his family and other people; social, he learned how to socialize, to obey and approve the social role well; aspiration, it was only the beginning of activities that would be releted to the achievement either succeeded or fails; sexual, he thought that no one forbids it, because it was the cultural effect to the sex orientation; education, he realized that study was more important that another, however his neighborhood and parents had the biggest influence to his personality development; and family, the relationship between Luke and his family was the most important factor of personality development, therefore the family influence had agreat impact to him.

The descriptions of Luke Chandler’s personality relate to his emotions that are found in the novel as follows: emotional balance, Luke had a good emotional balance. He showed his tolereance, his effort to learn how to manage his anger and confront obstacles without going to pieces emotionally; emotional control, he was very mature in his lack of selfishness, and his ability to understand what the predicament of others might be; emotional stress including anxiety, the description of Luke’s ability to cope with his emotional stress was shown in the most part of the novel, fortunately he had the ability to cope with his problems and to control his emonation so that he did not suffer much from the anxiety; frustration, he was someone who rarely gets frustrated; jealousy, the feeling of jealousy came to Luke when he felt the inability to defend his possession; and envy, it came from himself that he could not be a good player as Hank.

Finally, the suggestion proposed is that the analysis of literary works is possible to be done in other points of view. Besides from psychological aspects, they can also be analysis from sociological, feminist, linguistic and many others. Furthermore, the analysis is also done in other types of personalities as deep as possible such as on physical, intellectual, social, aspiration and achievement, sexual, education, and family.