A Study Of The Tragedy In Alice Munro’s Short Stories From The Perspective Of Existentialism

Alice Munro,a famous Canadian writer known as the master of contemporary short stories,draws on what she sees and hears in real life,and she is concerned about the existence of people living on the margins of society,showing the confusion,alienation and suffering in life.Death,disease and insanity are more frequent occurrences in Munro’s short stories.The characters in the short stories choose to struggle with sufferings in difficult situation,and move towards transcendence in the midst of sufferings.The tragic endings do not convey passive and negative emotional thoughts to the world,but reveal the tenacity and tension of life from the transcendence of existence and ignite people’s desire for existence,thus interpreting the sublime and greatness of tragedy,which is the tragedy of existence in Alice Monroe’s short stories.The thesis selects nine representative short stories as the textual study based on different creative periods of Alice Munro,and adopts the methods of intensive reading and literature analysis,combined with existentialism to study the tragedy of existence in the short stories.The thesis is divided into five chapters.Chapter one introduces Alice Munro and her short stories,literature review at home and abroad,and theoretically defines the tragedy of existence in this thesis.Tragedy does not only mean the failure and the futility in reality,butalso make people to think deeply about life and understand the world in the midst of existence,from which they gain more rational freedom and understanding.Chapter two interprets the tragedy of existence in short stories,which is mainly reflected in four aspects,the sacrifice of self,the conflicts with others,the constraint of inherent social concepts,and the opposition between the existential environment and people.Chapter three explores the tragic causes of existence.The defects of human nature,the contradictions and conflicts between emotion and reason,the restlessness of inner nature,and the irresistible of the external environment,which are the root causes of the tragedy.Therefore these reasons can be summarized in three aspects,that is,the alienation of social characters,the differences in gender division of labors,and the isolated of marginal space.Chapter four reveals Alice Munro’s tragic view of existence with universality and sublime characters.Existence is tragic,and Alice Munro responds to the thinking about human nature and life through her short stories,reflecting the realities of the real world and the state of being.Even though tragedy is universal,the struggle of characters with sufferings in tragic contradictions has made people see the brilliance of humanistic thought and shows the sublime nature of shocking personality.Chapter five is conclusion.The tragic pervasiveness of existence revealed in Alice Munro’s short stories is common existential in people’s daily lives,which is also the existential dilemma shared by globalization of humanization.This is also a concern and description of the entire human existence.The objective and neutral philosophy of existence that emerges from it also has more practical significance in exploring the way out of the dilemma.