An Analysis Of Juliet’s Life Journey In Juliet’s Trilogy By Alice Munro From The Perspective Of Archetype Of Odysseus

Alice Munro is a most distinguished short story writer in today’s world and was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2013. She is concerned with the spiritual status of ordinary people and her stories always give close attention to the mental development and inward world of women. Juliet’s trilogy, taken from Munro’s collection of short stories Runaway, displays the life experience and mental development of an intellectual woman. Juliet made efforts to pursue self-realization and the ultimate happiness with constant attempts. In her lifelong pursuit journey, Juliet suffered from hardship, alienation, despair, escape and many failures. Despite the fact that many of her attempts failed and that she didn’t achieve the ultimate goal of her pursuit at the end of the story, instead of giving up, Juliet was still on her journey of exploration and life pursuit in hope.Based on previous archetypal studies, this thesis adopts Jung’s archetypal theories to analyze Juliet’s life journey in Juliet’s trilogy. In Jung’s archetypal theories, unconscious is comprised of personal unconscious and collective unconscious. Archetypes, hidden deeply in the collective unconscious, exert great impact on a person’s mental condition, consciousness and behaviors by way of personal unconscious. With the focus on the allusions of Juliet’s life experience to that of the epic hero Odysseus, this thesis studies Juliet’s lifelong pursuit journey from the view of the archetype of Odysseus, attempting to explore the psychic power in the collective unconscious of Juliet and to find out the underlying causes which promote her constant pursuit.This thesis studies Juliet’s tortuous life experience on the basis of Jung’s theories of collective unconscious and archetypes, and main conclusions are drawn as follows:Firstly, apart from the suppression of traditional social values on women’s spiritual pursuit, the conflict between Juliet’s introverted thinking characteristics and her feeling function in the personal unconscious, and the conflict between persona and shadow, are viewed as the major factors of her spiritual imbalance and alienation. This imbalance and alienation is embodied in her inner struggle, confusion, compromise, breakdown and certain emblematic dreams as well. Secondly, Juliet’s life experience is believed as an allusion to the tales of epic hero Odysseus. The Odyssean quest spirit, derived from the collective unconscious of Juliet, seems to have been embodied in her lifelong pursuit journey. The archetype of Odysseus is seen as the psychic power of Juliet’s constant exploration in some way, which contributes to her understanding of life, society, her inner self, and eventual self-realization. Thirdly, compared with the ideal objectives and perfect ending of Odysseus’ stories, Juliet’s spiritual pursuit which hasn’t been achieved is of realistic significance. It is because life is imperfect that people are driven to carry on with his constant pursuit of ideals, and based on their progress they can realize self-transcendence eventually. The Odyssean quest journey is a necessary process for people’s self-exploration and transcendence. This thesis hopes to develop more insights of the initiation and self-transcendence of intellectual women depicted by Munro, and meanwhile to bring enlightenments for modern people’s spiritual pursuit through the archetypal analysis of Juliet’s life journey.