says to him to wait for Nana and Poppy, his grandparents, to take him so he can live with them. This is the time where his journey began.
He lives well with his grandparents until one day, his mother comes back to take him with her. Some attempts are done by grandparents to keep Brandon at
their side includes hiring a lawyer, but the custody of Brandon is won by his mother. Instead of giving Brandon back to his mother, Nana and Poppy take
Brandon to Florida to start a new life with the new identity. In Florida, Brandon meets new people and is also involved in various conflicts with the people there
directly or indirectly. The various conflicts that he faces in his life lead him to realize the real and truly meaning of home. For him, home is not only a building,
but also a place where his people are.
B. Approach of the Study
The writer analyzes this novel by using the psychological approach. The approach is the appropriate one to answer the problem formulation in this study.
Actually, literature and psychology are different from one another, but they have a close relationship which benefits one another. Fiction, drama, poetry, and essay
belong to literature, while psychology learns human behavior and mental process. The differences can be seen clearly but they have the similarity in discussing
human and life. Since this study deals with the conflicts and the reactions to the conflicts
that are also seen from psychology point of view, the most appropriate approach to apply is psychological approach. Mary Rohrberger and Samuel H. Woods in
Reading and Writing About Literature mention that psychological approach is a viewpoint from where readers could observe certain human recurrent pattern.
Like mythopoeic approach to literature, the psychological involves the effort to locate and demonstrate certain recurrent pattern. Unlike the
mythopoeic approach, it draws on a different body of knowledge-most often on that offered by Sigmund Freud and his followers. This is not to
say that all psychological criticism postdates Freud 1971: 14.
From explanation above, it is understood that psychological approach is aimed to observe literature specifically by using the theory of psychology, in
which the pattern of human mind is widely studied. Here, psychological theory is utilized as the basis of the observation. The most often theory that is used is one
proposed by the founding father of psychology, Sigmund Freud. Nevertheless, there is still a wide possibility for using other experts’ theories since this body of
knowledge is developed through time.
C. Method of the Study
In doing the research of the study, the writer used the library research method to answer the problems that are formulated in the previous chapter. There
are two kinds of data used in the study. The first and the primary data, is the novel written by Michael Morris, Slow Way Home and it was published in 2003. The
secondary data are the books that were used to provide the theories, such as Perrine’s Literature: Structure, Sound and Sense, Abram’s A Glossary of Literary
Terms and Teska Psychology: A Biosocial Study of Behavior. Besides books, the writer also used some criticisms that were taken from internet.
