This study probes the interface between literature and violence by examining the extent to which the literary object on terrorism, in the context of contemporary Nigerian urban fiction, can be of universal significance as a literary work of art. Using Dibia Humphrey’s The End of Dark Street, we shall see how the revolutionary and reactionary forms of terrorism of the protagonist, Abba Bello, transcends the literal to yield a more philosophical object worth critical attention. For such investigation, Archetypal criticism, following the model of Northrop Frye, and the Freudian psychoanalytic theory, are vital methods, for they reveal the literary scapegoatism inherent in the ‘individual consciousness’ and the ‘unconscious processes’ involved in the ‘textual life altering’ of the protagonist. As a scapegoat archetype, Bello’s character follows the pattern of ‘the revolutionary’, which manifests in the form of a rebel, a threat to society, a terrorist. This pattern, as well as others, is a collective unconscious, which is primordial, that is, we, as individuals, have these archetypal images ingrained in our understanding even before we are born; and universal, meaning that these archetypes can be found all over the world and throughout history. The manifestation of the idea may be different, but the idea itself is the same. The contemporary sense of terrorism is not entirely new to the literary tradition, for, as we shall see in this study, it can exist on a literary plane as an archetype. The research, therefore, aims to evaluate the extent to which the protagonist is a terrorist, the kind of terrorist he is, and one way—of literary interpretation—through which his character as a terrorist can be viewed in literary studies (vis-à-vis the Archetypal criticism)—the scapegoat archetype. Apart from attending to the neglected sub-genre of Nigerian urban fiction and the treatment of the subject of terrorism from a literary perspective, this study also imparts the timelessness of literature and the literary object as a transnational resource given its universal significance.
Key words: scapegoatism, terrorism, archetypes, universal, literariness.