In recent decades, psychological criticism has proved to be one of the most inquiring and applicable of contemporary critical approaches. Freud, Jung and Lacan were the most important psychologists of the twentieth century who, through using the fundamental concepts common in their theories, introduced a great change in reading literary texts; nevertheless, Iranian literary critics while neglecting the psychological approaches to some extent, have limited their studies to certain introspective works such as Hedāyat’s Blind Owl.
In this article using the two fundamental Lacanian concepts “other” and “gaze”, we have distinguished and explained the narrative levels of Shāmloo’s poem “Hamlet” in order to show how the voices of the two main narrators (Hamlet and the player) are intermingled and why they are disjoined. Another concept to be discussed is the archetype of fratricide as the structural axis which makes possible the paradigmatic relations of the poem.
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