WERTHER AND SELF-DECEPTIONRomanticism was deeply interested in creating art and literature about suffering, pain, and self-pity. With poets longing for long-gone love and authors falling in love with unavailable people, it seems that literary romantics were primarily concerned with self-harm and illusion. In Goethe's novel "The Sorrows of Young Werther" we find another romantic character who fulfills his tragic destiny by falling victim to extreme illusion. Werther's story may seem simple and even banal to some: a young man falls in love with a woman he can never be with and deludes himself into believing that she loves him too only to be seriously disappointed at the end. When there is nothing left to hope for, Werther commits suicide. Durkheim describes this type of suicide as selfish suicide where a person commits suicide to make others regret it. “Egoistic suicide,” writes Durkheim, “results from the fact that man no longer finds a basis for his existence in life” (258). But upon closer analysis, this story is anything but simple. This is a psychologically complex narrative that fully highlights the extreme internal mental conflict a person would experience in such a situation. Many claim that this story is autobiographical in nature, but that is beyond the scope of our current discussion. Romantic literature was on the one hand concerned with tragedy and, on the other hand, it also dwelt on sympathy. The goal of most Romantic writers and poets was to engage in the development of characters who could attract sympathy and pity. However, in this novel, although sympathy, pity, or self-harm was one of the driving forces behind the creation of Werther's character, it also appears that the psychological exploration of a person's mental state caught in this unfortunate situation was the main objective. Werther's character is seriously delusional. He regularly deceives himself into believing that Lotte, the woman he fell in love with, was too. He seems to study her every move, every eye contact, and then decodes it in his own way, which further contributes to self-deception. Werther keeps finding different reasons to make himself believe that Lotte loved him or that he was an inimitable being with a rather unique destiny. For example, he uses Lotte's sympathetic attitude toward him as justification for deeper self-pity, delusion, and self-harm...