WERTHER AND SELF-DECEPT Romanticism was deeply interested in creating art and literature of suffering, pain and self-pity. With poets pining for a long gone and dead love and authors falling in love with unavailable people, it seems that romantics in literature were mostly concerned with self-harm and disappointment. In Goethe's novel "The Sorrows of Young Werther" we find another romantic character who fulfills his tragic destiny by falling victim to extreme self-deception. Werther's story may seem simple and even banal to some: a young man falls in love with a woman he knows. she can never be with him and deludes himself into believing that she loves him too, only to be severely disappointed in the end. When there is nothing left to look forward to, Werther kills himself. Durkheim describes this type of suicide as selfish suicide in which a person kills himself to displease others. “Egoistic suicide,” Durkheim writes, “results from the fact that man no longer finds a basis for existence in life” (258). But upon closer inspection, this story is anything but simple. It is a psychologically complex tale that brings to light the extreme internal mental conflict that a person in such a situation would undergo. Many argue that this story is autobiographical in nature, but this is beyond the scope of our current discussion. Romantic literature dealt with tragedy on the one hand and also focused on sympathy on the other. The aim of most Romantic writers and poets was to engage in the development of characters who attracted sympathy and pity. However in this novel, although it may have been sympathy, pity or self-harm that constituted one of the motivating forces behind the creation of Werther's character, it also appears that the psychological exploration of the mental state of a person caught up in this unfortunate situation it was the main purpose. Werther's character is seriously delusional. He regularly deludes himself into believing that Lotte, the woman he fell in love with, was also in love with him. He seems to study his every move, his every eye contact and then continues to decode it in his own way, further aiding in self-deception. Werther continually finds different reasons to convince himself that Lotte loved him or that he was an inimitable being with a rather unique destiny. For example, he uses Lotte's sympathetic attitude towards him as a justification to engage in deeper self-pity, disappointment, and self-harm..