Psychological analysis on The Main Characters of "Atheist' by Achdiat Karta Mihardja

ABSTRACT

Literature is one of the knowledge that has power in giving advantages to the people who want learn it. Literature has many branches such as poetry, novel, song, prose, etc. One of the most challenging is when people analyze the novel, because novel has the allusion words in implicit and explicit part that hard to be analyzed. Novel is where the characters are portrayed so briefly and so unique like what happened in real world and real life.

The writer chooses the novel as the subject of the study. The novel to be studied is the Indonesian novel entitled ،Atheist’ by Achdiat Karta Mihardja. The novel atheist describes about the religious life of the characters, and it is rich in portraying human life with their conflicts in the good and bad sides. This novel depicts psychological power on every character. It is contains so many valuable lessons of life, especially about the religious life.

Due to those phenomena, this thesis is analyzed based on the psychological analysis that is specifically focuses on the psychology of religion analysis. The writer focuses on this analysis because it is one of the branches of psychology, and because the writer wants to prove that novel can be analyzed not only from the literary aspects but also from the other aspect point of view.

The research problem of this study only concerned on how are the motive and attitude of the characters toward religion, and how is the religious conversion of the characters in the novel atheist. The kind of research of this thesis is qualitative research where the key instrument is the writer herself and the result is descriptive and subjective one.

The findings of this study are accordance to the research problem. ,There are at least two findings, where each of findings is result from the analysis.

The conclusion of this study is also accordance to the research problem and the findings. There are at least two points of the conclusion. For the motive of the characters toward religion there are three motives, those are to contend the fear, to
contend the social frustration, to keep the moral or ethics. For the attitude of the characters toward religion, there are four attitudes, those are accommodating belief, conscious belief, vacillation belief, and unbelief. Then for the religious conversion of the characters there are four factors that caused the characters got the religious conversion, those are by the influenced and invited of other characters, by living place, by inharmonic family and changing status, and by the lack of religion education of the family.

The last, the writer suggests to all of English student to give their attention to literature especially the novel, and also to continue this sort of study in more comprehensive forms.