Motivations of Safety Needs in Wilson’s The Piano Lesson

DOI

10.2991/978-2-38476-002-2_19How to use a DOI?

Keywords

Motivation; Safety Needs; Hierarchy of Needs; Literary Criticism

Abstract

This paper explores motivations in meeting the needs of every human being can arise because of the differences in each individual in a literary text. The selected text is a play from August Wilson entitled The Piano Lesson. The study aims to explore the motivations of the characters’ safety needs. This study uses the theory of motivation and hierarchy of human needs by Abraham Maslow, by limiting on the motivation of the safety needs. The findings provide the discovery of six characters with different motivations and ways in fulfilling their safety needs. Within this perspective, the play itself become a representation on the way human’s motivation to fulfill their needs, especially the safety needs. The safety needs and the motivations of the characters are symbolized by the piano that becomes the center of the play. Although only 6 characters from 8 characters are proven to be developing motivations on fulfilling their safety needs. Based on those findings, August Wilson’s The Piano Lesson has provided the reader and audience a lesson of how a piano can represent not just a musical instrument but also hidden motivations of safety needs of the characters.

Copyright

© 2023 The Author(s)

Open Access

Open Access This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/), which permits any noncommercial use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license and indicate if changes were made.

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TY  - CONF
AU  - Muzakki Afifuddin
AU  - Putu Zahra Amalia Atiyoti Jwalita
PY  - 2023
DA  - 2023/03/14
TI  - Motivations of Safety Needs in Wilson’s The Piano Lesson
BT  - Proceedings of the 4th Annual International Conference on Language, Literature and Media (AICOLLIM 2022)
PB  - Atlantis Press
SP  - 192
EP  - 200
SN  - 2352-5398
UR  - https://doi.org/10.2991/978-2-38476-002-2_19
DO  - 10.2991/978-2-38476-002-2_19
ID  - Afifuddin2023
ER  -