Competing Psychic Hauntings
and the Fictional World Construction in Stephen King’s The
Waste Lands
Dr. Himakshi Kalita¹ and Swastishree
Saikia²
ABSTRACT
The paper seeks to explore the constructed
fictional universe of Stephen King’s The Waste Lands where the
perception of reality and dreams is blurred and an automatic
ontological conflict is where the fictive world draws its basis. The
experiential realities of each character is different and therefore
the traditional aspect of negotiating with a singular reality is
debunked by the narrative of the novel. Consequentially, the
competing psychic realities that exists in the speculative universe
of King, is examined through Marie-Laure Ryan’s Possible World
Theory. Ryan’s concepts pertaining to textual actual world,
alternative possible worlds, fictional recentering, accessibility
relations, epistemic worlds and embedded structure of fictional
universes are interlinked with concepts associated with psychosis,
which are used as mere psychological concepts and not narrative
theories, to describe the fractured nature of the fictive world and
the characters themselves. The psychic haunting evades the fictional
universe of The Waste Lands shows that the textual universe also
simultaneously contains an alternative psychic world that comprises
of incompatible histories and divided memories. The world that the
readers ultimately is a complex, plural and contests reality. The
psychological fragmentation of characters are transformed into a
principle of fictional construction.
Keywords: Possible Worlds Theory, psychic haunting, psychosis,
fictional world, fragmentation
