Psyche Character Analysis

Psyche is one of Japhy’s girlfriends, a beautiful but shy young woman who has strong feelings with Japhy but doesn’t want to have sex with him. Knowing that Psyche has trouble controlling her drinking, Japhy intentionally gets her drunk until she stops resisting his sexual advances—and disturbingly, nobody in the novel seems to think that there’s anything wrong with this. Although Japhy chooses to spend the night with Psyche over Princess and Polly at his going-away party, they get into a fight, which leads Psyche to try to drunk-drive away. (She backs into a ditch by accident and spends the night sleeping on Christine Monahan’s floor.) A few days later, she professes her love for Japhy and finally consents to have sex with him, in the cabin on his ship before he sails to Japan. But after they do the deed, she insists on going to Japan with him, and Japhy literally picks her up and throws her off the side of the boat in order to get her to leave. Like the other women in the novel, Psyche essentially portrayed as an irrational, sex-crazed child who has no personality or discernible purpose in life besides her intense love for Japhy. Kerouac portrays this as evidence of Japhy’s masculinity and intellectual excellence, but to a modern-day reader, Kerouac’s portrayal of Psyche might look very misogynistic.