The Strange Library: Boku's Heroic Journey of Committing Matricide(?)

I found an article that discusses Carl Jung's mother archetype and here's the link to it: https://ejop.psychopen.eu/index.php/ejop/article/view/401/html

To summarize, Jung's mother archetype can be both loving and nurturing, and also absorbing and manipulative. According to the article, Jung argues that men must tear themselves loose from their mothers or "kill" their mothers to fully mature, and that "the transition from unconscious life to conscious life in the development of humanity and the individual is mirrored in the separation of the child from the mother." Jung also proposes that “the first creative act of liberation [of the unconscious] is matricide."

I found the story of The Strange Library resembles Jung's theory of achieving maturity through "matricide" in many aspects.

I would like to first argue that the library (contaning its employees) is the mother figure in Boku's unconscious mind. On the surface level, Boku's mother and the library both nurture  and restrict him. While Boku's mother takes delicate care of him but gives him strict rules to follow, the library provides him great knowledge but locks him in a confinement. At the beginning of the story, Boku was directed to see the old man by a female librarian, and just like how he always obeyed his mother, he didn't question the librarian's word even though he wasn't so sure of the existence of a basement. He was wearing a pair of new leather shoes gifted by his mother that made "hard, dry sound" that he was not used to, and when he escaped from the library, he left the shoes behind in his cell. In a way, wearing shoes is like putting one's feet in confinement, and similarly, the old man in the library also ordered objects to be attached to Boku's feet, which he also broke away from when he escaped the library. Boku's mother considered the starling to be very noisy, so the starling-girl did not have a voice inside the library. Boku worried that his starling would starve to death if he doesn't feed her, which suggests that his mother was unable to recognize the need of the starling, and that also parallels to how the starling-girl was not seen by others in the library until the very end.

Boku on the outside perfectly fits Jung's description of "the persona" as the "conformity archetype." He did not seem to have his own judgements and simply made decisions because his mother/the old man said so or because he didn't want others to feel bad. When he returned Memoirs of a Shepherd, he compared himself to a shepherd who sticks to his schedules so his sheep don't go "completely bananas," which suggests that the sheepman in the story is likely "the shadow." The shadow is the animal side that has both creative and destructive energies, and this duality is also reflected in the sheep man who worked for the old man and locked Boku in his cell but also cooked for Boku and unlocked him in the end. Boku's "anima," the starling-girl, is a beautiful and courageous female figure who defied the rules and constraints in the library and helped Boku and the sheep man escape. Although the girl did not have a voice, Boku can still hear her in his mind, which suggests that she is part of him. After Boku left the library, both the girl and the sheep man disappeared because they were internal entities within him and not actual beings in the world.

After Boku the persona, his shadow and his anima teamed up and helped Boku break free from the library, his mother passed away from a mysterious illness and he was truly alone in the world. According to Jung's theory, his loneliness can also mark his independence as a fully matured individual who has committed matricide. It is said in the story that all libraries have similar cells and kidnap children in a similar fashion. Boku in the end also chose to not report the library, even though he knew other children will undergo a similar awful experience, perhaps because it's necessary for other children to cut their ties from their library by themselves and it's an internal process that takes place in the mind and cannot be intervened by any outside forces.

Crystal