An Analysis Of The Ballad Of The Sad Café Based On Sartre’s Existentialism

Carson McCullers is a unique Southern American writer of the twentieth century who isnamed as “a lonely hunter” because of her description of loneliness. All of McCullers’ workscan’t escape from the themes as loneliness, alienation, absence of love and spiritual isolation,and one of the shining points of her novel is the description of the marginal and the deformed.Even though McCullers is not a productive writer, still all her works are regarded as literaryclassics of American literature. The Ballad of the Sad Café is the only novella of McCullerswhich aroused influential effect in America when it came out.As the masterpiece of McCullers, The Ballad of the Sad Café best represents her writingstyle and features. Carson McCullers focuses her theme on the existing problem of modernman which is the same as Sartre’s existentialism. The protagonists in this novella are allorphans and the disabled, and they connect with each other through their born right as freechoice. However, the breakdown in their relations accelerates their alienation, and finally theygive up resisting and accept such boring life on the forbidden wasteland. Thus life to them is akind of hopeless waiting. The Ballad of the Sad Café discusses the existing problem of humanbeing based on love, so this thesis combines Sartre’s existentialism with the novella toexplore the deep reason of the tragedies of the three protagonists.In addition to the introduction and conclusion, this paper makes up of five chapters.Chapter one basically introduces The Ballad of the Sad Café and Carson McCullers’ life andher major works as well as the research status of this novella at home and abroad. Chapter twomainly interprets Sartre’s theory of existentialism which will be used to analyze The Ballad ofthe Sad Café. This part starts from the introduction of Sartre and his Existentialism includingtheory of existentialism which discusses about the meaninglessness of life, the theory ofothers which discusses the ridiculous relationship between human beings as well as the theoryof alienation which discusses the alienated life of man. Chapter three analyzes the tragedies ofthe heroes and heroine caused by the battle between free choices and taking responsibilitiesbased on the existential theory. Chapter four discusses the ridiculous relationships among thethree protagonists based on the theory of others. Meanwhile, this chapter mainly focuses onthe ridiculous living conditions of the three protagonists and other people of the town basedon the theory others. Chapter five mainly analyzes the alienated living conditions of the people in the novella based on alienation theory of Sartre including the alienation betweenman and man, man and society as well as man and things. Chapter three to chapter five formsthe main body of this paper and they are progressive between one and another.