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Popular Culture Review
as he is forced past them, left mumbling to himself (even after the declared
ending of the book) about his embarrassment at having been a part of it all, at
having been alive.
What is it, after all, that Grover fears? He fears himself, yes. But the
anxiety is, perhaps, the outward marker of a repressed wish to stifle his superego
and allow his Id more room to play. The Id—insatiable, ravenous, and without
restraint—is the monster that is there all along. Some would say that to have
such a fractured identity and an unbalanced sense of self is the ultimate source
of Grover’s unease, but the strict Freudian reading would be more complex.
Anxiety is a manifestation of Grover’s realization that he truly is not so
fractured, that he truly is beastly and thus should be comfortable being more
fully libidinous, care-free, and unafraid. But Grover cannot consciously accept
his own desires (which he can only characterize as monstrous) and so the
repressed wish to be free manifests itself as fear. The anxiety present in The
Monster at the End of the Book is thus not really a fear of the monster but a
secret desire to be the monster.
Consider, for instance, that Grover wishes he could accept his primitive
instinctive impulses and live, perhaps, like The Cookie Monster. The Cookie
Monster, whose very name denotes his monstrous being, is pure Id. This is what
Grover wishes he could be: indulgent of his appetites, wild and carefree, lustful,
gluttonous, and pleasure-seeking. Grover must see, for instance, his own
scrawny blue body and arms, and think of The Cookie Monster’s Bacchanalian
heft. Grover must see the Monster’s black hole of a mouth, the look of insatiable
hunger and passion on the Monster’s face. Grover must see the way the cookie
crumbles fly in orgiastic frenzy when the Monster eats, the shards of baked
goods falling in the thick cerulean fur that covers the Monster’s voluminous
flesh, the googly eyes swirling in ecstatic orgasmic abandon as he gives himself
over to his unquenchable craving. Grover’s anxiety, that is, is not a fear of
monsterhood but a secret and repressed wish to have a little cookie himself.
What is at work on an individual as well as a larger philosophical scale,
then, is a rejection of the pure logic of the superego, a critique of the project of
rationality and its failure to capture the lived-experience of the Self In order to
make this clearer, we turn to one final text of comparison—to a parallel between
Grover and a different sort of beast, to the tunneling little animal protagonist of
Franz Kafka’s ‘The Burrow.”
My burrow takes up too much of my thoughts. 1 fled from the
entrance fast enough, but soon I am back at it again. I seek out
a good hiding-place and keep watch on the entrance of my
house—this time from the outside—for whole days and nights.
Call it foolish if you like; it gives me infinite pleasure and
reassures me. At such times it is as if I were not so much
looking at my house as at myself sleeping. . . . [True,] it need
not be any particular enemy that is provoked to pursue
me. . . . [I]t may be someone of my own kind. . .. Perpetually