Abstract This paper examines the fragmented self-concepts represented by Halle Butler’s Jillian (2015; reissued 2020) and The New Me (2019) through a comparative, Freudian psychoanalytic framework. The novels portray women whose inward accounts of themselves do not align comfortably with their conduct, relationships, or social environments. In Jillian, the self-destructive Jillian and the resentful Megan form a disturbing relational pair: each judges the other while remaining implicated in patterns of evasion, hostility, and self-deception. In The New Me, Millie’s imagined future self repeatedly conflicts with her habitual routines and the precarious conditions of her working life; the novel’s attention to workplace consciousness also reveals how identities are shaped by external judgment. Freud’s structural model of id, ego, and superego, together with the concepts of repression, projection, rationalisation, and the return of uncomfortable knowledge, provides a vocabulary for interpreting these contradictions. The analysis does not diagnose fictional characters; rather, it uses psychoanalysis as a literary method for reading narrative voice, defensive behaviour, and divided self-perception. Juxtaposition shows that Jillian dramatises fragmentation through antagonistic interpersonal relations, whereas The New Me locates it more insistently within repetitive labour, consumer culture, and the fantasy of self-reinvention. Butler’s deadpan comedy exposes the gap between the self one claims to be, the self one performs, and the self one fears becoming.

Keywords Fragmented self-concept; Sigmund Freud; psychoanalytic criticism; female protagonists; contemporary American fiction.

Introduction: The Fragmented Self in Contemporary Fiction A coherent self is often imagined as a stable centre from which a person understands experience, makes choices, and sustains relationships. Contemporary fiction frequently unsettles that assumption. Its protagonists may narrate themselves as reasonable, independent, or on the verge of transformation while acting in ways that contradict these descriptions. Fragmentation, in this sense, does not necessarily mean a literal split personality. It refers to a disjunction among self-image, desire, behaviour, social performance, and the interpretations imposed by others. Halle Butler’s Jillian and The New Me are especially productive for this comparison because both use comic discomfort to represent women whose everyday lives are marked by dissatisfaction and defensive self-narration.

Jillian follows two women on different but intersecting trajectories: Jillian, whose cheerful self-presentation sits beside selfish and destructive conduct, and Megan, a young medical receptionist whose resentment and harsh judgments shape her view of others. The novel’s tension comes partly from the reader’s inability to settle into a simple moral position. Jillian can be exasperating, yet the people around her are not presented as entirely free from cruelty or self-interest. Megan’s apparent capacity to see through Jillian does not guarantee that she sees herself clearly. The novel thus makes self-knowledge relational: a character’s account of another person often reveals the narrator’s own anxieties and blind spots.

The argument is that Butler’s protagonists are fragmented not because they lack all self-awareness, but because self-awareness is partial, defensive, and frequently ineffective. They can recognise aspects of their situation without accepting the implications of that recognition. Psychoanalytic criticism is useful here because it attends to conflict between conscious explanation and less acknowledged desire. However, the analysis remains literary rather than clinical: fictional behaviour cannot establish a real-world diagnosis, and Freud’s concepts are used as interpretive models, not as experimentally verified explanations of these characters.

Theoretical Framework: Freud and Literary Psychoanalysis Sigmund Freud’s structural model distinguishes the id, ego, and superego. In simplified terms, the id represents instinctual demands and the pursuit of immediate satisfaction; the ego negotiates between desire, moral demands, and external reality; and the superego represents internalised standards, prohibitions, and ideals. These are not three separate people inside a character. They are a conceptual way to describe competing pressures within psychic life. A fragmented self may be read as the effect of unstable negotiation among these pressures: a desire is felt, a moral or social standard condemns it, and the ego develops explanations that make the conflict easier to tolerate.

Freud’s concept of repression refers to the exclusion of distressing thoughts or wishes from conscious awareness, while projection involves attributing to others feelings or motives that are difficult to acknowledge in oneself. Rationalisation offers an apparently reasonable explanation for behaviour whose motivating pressures may be less acceptable. These concepts should be applied cautiously. A character’s criticism of another person is not automatically projection, and every contradiction is not evidence of repression. The interpretation becomes persuasive only when it is supported by patterns in narrative voice, repeated conduct, irony, or the difference between what a character claims and what the plot shows.

In The Ego and the Id, Freud describes the ego as an entity that must negotiate demands from the id, the superego, and the external world. This model helps illuminate Butler’s protagonists because they are pulled between immediate gratification, imagined ideals, and practical limitations. Jillian’s performance of cheerfulness can be read as a social mask that makes her behaviour easier to present, while Megan’s contempt for others may protect her from confronting her own disappointment. Millie’s future-oriented self-improvement fantasy can be understood as an idealised superego image: she measures the present self against a disciplined, organised, socially validated version of herself.

The ego’s defensive work is particularly important to this paper. Defence mechanisms reduce anxiety or protect a person’s self-image, but they can also distort perception and delay change. In Butler’s fiction, humour and deadpan narration create a further complication: the prose may expose a character’s contradiction even when the character does not fully acknowledge it. Readers can therefore observe a gap between narrative self-justification and the broader pattern of events. Irony becomes a literary analogue of divided consciousness, allowing a text to communicate more than a protagonist is prepared to say directly.

This approach also has limits. Freud’s theories emerged from a specific historical context and have been debated, revised, and criticised. They should not be treated as a complete scientific account of personality or as a substitute for social analysis. Butler’s characters are shaped by economic precarity, gendered expectations, workplace hierarchy, and contemporary ideals of self-optimisation. A psychoanalytic reading is strongest when it connects inward conflict to those material conditions rather than explaining every difficulty as an individual defect. The present study therefore combines Freudian vocabulary with close attention to narrative form and social setting.

Jillian: Performance, Hostility, and the Divided Self In Jillian, the title character’s self-presentation is a central source of unease. The novel frames Jillian as someone whose bright, seemingly uncomplicated manner coexists with conduct that burdens and frustrates the people around her. This mismatch between outward affect and interpersonal effect produces a fragmented self-image: she can sustain a version of herself as cheerful or harmless while the consequences of her actions suggest a less flattering account. From a Freudian perspective, the performance may be interpreted as a defence against uncomfortable self-knowledge. The point is not that Jillian consciously plans every deception, but that her preferred identity and the evidence of her behaviour fail to align.

The id-ego-superego model offers one way to describe this tension. Immediate wants and the pursuit of personal satisfaction may dominate Jillian’s choices, while the superego’s moral demands appear weak, inconsistent, or managed through surface-level social performance. The ego, meanwhile, works to preserve an acceptable self-image. Where the character’s behaviour threatens that image, a cheerful manner or a convenient explanation may function as a shield. Butler’s comedy arises from the distance between this shield and the social reality that others experience. The reader is encouraged to see both the act and the discomfort it conceals.

Megan provides a crucial counterpoint. She is not simply a morally reliable observer who exposes Jillian’s flaws. Her resentment, sharp judgments, and attention to other people’s shortcomings create their own pattern of self-protection. Criticism can offer a temporary feeling of superiority: by defining Jillian as the problem, Megan can position herself as the person who understands the situation. Yet this position becomes unstable when Megan’s own actions and attitudes reveal bitterness and limitations. Psychoanalytically, her judgment of Jillian can sometimes be read as a possible form of projection—not as a blanket explanation, but as a question the text invites: does Megan condemn in Jillian something she fears or refuses to acknowledge in herself?

The relationship between the women consequently resists a clean opposition between villain and victim. Their contrasting personalities do not cancel out their similarities. Both depend on stories about themselves; both interpret other people through emotionally charged judgments; and both appear constrained by habits that they cannot easily convert into insight. Jillian’s social brightness and Megan’s cynicism look like opposites, yet each can operate as a defence. One softens the appearance of selfishness; the other turns disappointment into a weapon of evaluation. In both cases, the self is protected at the cost of genuine self-examination.

Narrative tone strengthens this analysis. Butler’s deadpan style does not consistently instruct readers to sympathise with one woman and condemn the other. Instead, it keeps the reader in an uncomfortable position, aware of the characters’ cruelty and vulnerability at once. This tonal refusal mirrors the instability of self-knowledge: the women are not reducible to the versions they perform, but neither does the novel offer a pure inner self untouched by behaviour. Their identities emerge through contradiction. In this sense, Jillian presents fragmentation as interpersonal and ethical: the self becomes divided through the struggle to maintain a favourable image while negotiating the judgments of others.

The New Me: Millie and the Fantasy of Reinvention Millie’s central conflict in The New Me is between the person she is and the person she repeatedly imagines becoming. She wants a life with greater order, confidence, and social legitimacy, and she invests hope in the possibility that a permanent job might make that life available. Yet her habits and circumstances keep returning her to a familiar cycle. The imagined future self functions as a standard against which the present self appears inadequate. This gap is the novel’s clearest expression of fragmentation: Millie experiences herself as both the person who desires change and the person who repeatedly fails to enact the desired transformation.

Juxtaposed Analysis: Two Forms of Fragmentation Placed side by side, Jillian and The New Me reveal a shared pattern: each protagonist’s self-concept is unstable because self-description does not reliably lead to self-knowledge. Jillian’s fragmentation is enacted outwardly through relationships and the difference between a pleasant presentation and damaging effects. Millie’s fragmentation is organised around time: she repeatedly projects a future self while remaining caught in the present. Jillian appears to protect herself through social performance; Millie protects herself through fantasy, cynicism, and postponement. These are not identical strategies, but both preserve a tolerable self-image while delaying a difficult encounter with reality.

Freud’s structural model clarifies the different pressures at work. In Jillian, immediate desire and self-protective performance often seem to outweigh moral accountability, while Megan’s severe judgments suggest the force of internal standards redirected outward. In The New Me, the superego appears as a demanding image of the improved adult, the id as the pull of immediate comfort or escape, and the ego as the struggling mediator between these wishes and material constraints. This mapping is heuristic rather than exact: literary characters do not need to embody one psychic structure at a time. Their complexity lies in the continual interaction of desire, judgment, and reality.

In both novels, humour complicates the reader’s response. The comic voice makes uncomfortable behaviour readable without neutralising its consequences. Readers may recognise the characters’ defensive logic while also noticing its limitations. This double response resembles psychoanalytic interpretation itself: an explanation may increase understanding without automatically producing change. The protagonists’ contradictions are neither solved by naming a defence nor erased by blaming society. Instead, Butler’s fiction shows how individual habits and social arrangements reinforce each other. Fragmentation is produced where desire, self-image, moral judgment, and material reality fail to cohere.

Conclusion This comparative reading has argued that Jillian and The New Me portray fragmented self-concepts through different but related forms of contradiction. Jillian’s outward cheerfulness and harmful interpersonal conduct unsettle the identity she performs, while Megan’s resentment demonstrates that the observer is also vulnerable to defensive self-narration. Millie’s longing for a “new” self exposes a gap between an idealised future and a repetitive present shaped by precarious employment and cultural demands for self-improvement. In both novels, self-knowledge is partial: characters may perceive their dissatisfaction but remain unable to convert perception into meaningful change.