An Archetypal Study Of Life, Death And Rebirth In Sophie’s Choice

William Styron is known as a great modern writer whose works with Jewish and American southern characteristics are very popular in the world. He is regarded as one of the greatest writers since Ernest Miller Hemingway and William Faulkner. He makes a great contribution to American literature.His masterpiece Sophie’s Choice wins great reputation for him. The studies of this novel by critics are wider and deeper in the recent years. In the novel, William Styron discusses life and death of human beings. It corresponds to archetypal study.Archetypal theories are mainly built by the Swedish psychologist C. G. Jung and Canada literary critic Northrop Frye. Jung thinks archetypes were original images impressed on our mind from hundreds of thousands of human experience and never went into the conscious. Archetypes are the embodiments of the collective unconscious, developing from the human embodied experience of more than hundreds of thousands of years. Northrop Frye thought that the repeated images,conflicts and modes appearing in the literary works are archetypes. He regarded this criticism to study archetypes in literature as archetype – mythology criticism. He also offered a new literary approach to study the literary works. The Archetypal criticism aims to study archetypes in literary works to find out the shared human experience.In the thesis I try to study the life, death and rebirth in Sophie’s Choice from the perspective of archetypal criticism in order to reveal human collective psychological and spiritual experience and its meaning.There are four chapters in this thesis. The first chapter is mainly about the introduction to William Styron, his works and the latest study of his works. Then it also gives a brief introduction to definitions, features, development and present studies of archetype and archetypal criticism. The second chapter studies the features, development and meanings of life and death archetypes in the novel. The third chapter explores Sophie’s and other characters’ rebirth. The last chapter is the conclusion of the whole thesis.