Human life and human personality have been studied thoroughly throughout many years, but there are different ways of studying these aspects of humanity. Human personality may be defined as the pattern of collective character, behavioral, temperamental, emotional, and mental traits of a person. One way to analyze human life and personality is through the use of scientific psychology. Psychology is the science that seeks to understand behavior and mental processes, and to apply that understanding in the service of human welfare. This is an unbiased observation of the human personality and life. The other method of analyzing human life and personality is through novels. A Novel is a book-length fictional story usually involving relationships between characters, their emotional crises and events concerning them. Novels usually have meanings involved in them that the author is trying to make the reader aware of. The extent in which we learn more from novels than from scientific psychology is due to the emotional attachment from the author to pinpoint useful meanings of life and human personality, while scientific psychology has no emotional connection with these meanings. Although psychology has a thorough insight of the mind and mental processes, it does not bind meanings to its analysis.
Novels supply the reader with a lot of information about human life and human personality. The author of a novel can give the reader a well developed story with a meaning behind it about life or characters’ personalities. A good example of this would be Tayeb Salih’s book “Season of Migration to the North”, which gives a thorough psycho analysis of human personality and what man goes through. In his book the anonymous narrator, who is played as first-person, keeps constant conversations between him and the readers although they do not talk back. He suffers different conflicts that many go through as to influence of people, changing ideas, personality changes, etc. This is meant to show how people learn more about life through novels as they give examples, although expressed through fiction. These examples, although fictional, are meant to captivate the reader as he can relate to them. Usually the meanings are revealed throughout the novel, as they bind to the storyline and the author’s intentions are subtly placed and flow well throughout the novel. In Tayeb Salih’s novel, the narrator experiences many life changing events and meets an influential figure, Mustafa, that changed his life views of living a peaceful life. At a point in the novel, his mind leads him to anger and rage, after the woman he fell in love with committed suicide. These are all characteristics that represent human personality, which most readers would understand when they read it. Another novel that shows aspects of human life is Naguib Mahfouz’s “Midaq Alley”. The meanings of life are expressed through one character, Sheikh Darwish, which most people say could be the author’s direct words. His ideas are directly associated to the author, for example his quote at the end of the book “O Lady of Laides, O Fulfiller of all needs…mercy…mercy, O People of the House! I will be patient so long as I live, for do not all things have their end? Oh yes, everything comes to its nihaya. And the word for this in English is ‘end’ and it is spelled e-n-d…” (Page 286) He shows at the end of the novel that all human life ends and that all human at one time would ask for mercy, its human nature. It is a direct showing of how a person would learn more from novels than through a psychological unbiased analysis.
