Crises And Escape

Call It Sleep tells about a Jewish boy David growing up in the slum of New York with his consciousness of sex, religion, identity, and life. It has attracted the critic's attention for the later half of the last century, and in the long run, was labeled as a proletarian novel, a Bildungsroman, a Jewish novel, a case of Oedipus complex, and a masterpiece of modernism—so various identifications and critical approaches are enough to indicate its complexity. Therefore, Semiological approach, Barthes's five codes in particular, is adopted to take advantage of all the previous fruits and give a more comprehensive analysis.However, it is too much a labor to cut such a long novel into lexias as Barthes did in S/Z, so the detailed analysis can be only a mental action and displayed as a summary with the necessary examples. It contains three parts—the structural codes, the contextual codes, the psychological codes. Roughly speaking, the structural codes mainly consist of ACT and HEM; the contextual codes and psychological codes contain REF, SEM and SYM. What makes them different is their divergent emphases on connotation which is not narrated literally.The structural codes study the text organization and the narrative. The five books constituting the whole novel not only cut the text vertically but expand the meaning through the first and second order signification. The narration evolves about David's development with unfolding the enigmas of"sleep"and identity, presenting the different motifs characterizing the modernism of the text. For this part,"sleep"works as a natural ending of the narration as the boy finishes his cognition.The contextual codes take the history, culture, society and biographical information into account to construct the world in which the characters act. This part points out that David, faced with the social, religious, identity and life crises, goes to"sleep"to escape the outside that alienates an individual when the tradition recedes into tumult.The psychological codes probe the psyche of the characters. They are the projection of the contextual codes into the characters'mind, or in other words, the character's coding of the outside. David, in the course of avoiding fear and pursuing pleasure, experiences the enlightenment of sex, religion, identity and death, which are no more than traumas and despondences, and thus he finally goes to"sleep", to accept a spiritual death or enter another world, whereupon"sleep"leads to the open interpretation."Sleep"gains meanings through the structure of the text, society, and psychology. David's"sleep"is required by the humanist concern—as an innocent boy, he should not die no matter how hard the reality is."Sleep"is the deftest narrative technique: it naturally concludes the text but opens a more spacious psychological world, making the text complete and mysterious."Sleep", however, is the unavoidable choice of a weak boy, an immigrant, an individual faced with the society, where prevail different kinds of crises such as that of religion, identity, sex and life. Everyone is doomed to be erased by the outside, to live is to exile oneself as the author of the novel did.