The End By Jim Morrison Literary Criticism

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The poem/song I will be analyzing is “The End” written by Jim Morrison, and performed by the band, The Doors. Firstly, I will start off with how the name of the band came to be and exactly what it means. According to the biographical book about Jim Morrison No One Here Gets Out Alive, written by The Doors manager Daniel Sugerman and co-authored by popular biography writer Jerry Hopkins, that while Jim was talking to a friend one day, “…about Dionysus, and remembering the line from William Blake, ‘If the doors of perception were cleansed, everything would appear to man as it truly is, infinite” (Hopkins, & Sugerman, 1980). And not long after, Jim formed the band named “The Doors: Open and Closed”, this would soon be one of the most influential rock bands of all time. Jim was a poet in essence, and started off his career with literature and writing poetry, then soon turned those poems into lyrics for songs that would be analyzed and interpreted in many ways still to this day. I feel that the basis for this song The End is about Jim’s perception of the world and the fascination with the realm of the unconscious. Some speculate that the song was written about his breaking up with one of his girlfriends in college, but over time the song developed much more meaning than that, and Jim himself wished for this song to be interpreted into whatever the listener wishes. After many changes to the lyrics and Jim’s variations of the song during performances, the lyrics took on a deeper more psychological meaning and offered his approach to views on life, and death. The most popular verses of the song are about Freud’s theory of the Oedipus complex. These lyrics were not in the original song but performed later, during times in which he was extremely intoxicated with psychedelics. Through psychedelic drugs such as LSD one can assume that Jim really was experiencing realms

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