A Fatal Attraction to Death: Ian McEwan's The Comfort of Strangers

In this essay I want to examine the relationship between perversion and an attraction to death. the attraction to death was first dealt with by Freud (1920). Based on observations regarding certain analysands' returning over and over again to painful past experiences, the behavior of those who repeatedly undergo several calamities, and the dreadful preoccupations of war veterans, Freud suggested that there might be a self-destructive, “daemonic force” (p. 35) at work in them. This force worked in opposition to the pleasure principle and was aligned with a fundamental attribute of mind that searched for reduction of all excitation to quiescence (the “Nirvana principle”). He concluded that “the aim of all life is death” (p. 38) and thus gave voice to his concept of “the death instinct.”

Freud (1920) considered sadism, which belongs to the death instinct, to point out the way to the libidinal component of the sexual instinct. Unlike him, Rosenfeld (1971), in his exploration of the destructive aspects of narcissism, stated that in cases when the aggressive instincts are linked to perversion, there is a pathological fusion of the instincts that does not lead to a lessening of their power. On the contrary, the erotization of the aggressive instincts greatly enhances power and violence. These processes seem to operate in their most virulent form in severe narcissistic conditions.

To illustrate my theme, I will use a close reading of The Comfort of Strangers, an early work by the great contemporary novelist Ian McEwan. This novel, published in 1981, evokes in the reader a sense of tremendous anxiety over an impending catastrophe, by connoting a picture of the protagonists' morbid attraction to an abyss, or hole, that seems to be pulling them over its edge. Colin and Mary are attracted to a local couple as “iron to a magnet” (Fromm 1973), and they are finally trapped in a fatal