The Existentialist Theme Of Alice Munro’s Lives Of Girls And Women

Lives of Girls and Women is the only novel by Alice Munro(1931-),a master of contemporary short stories.The small towns in the novel are filled with absurdity,and the masses living in them are either alienated into absurd "weirdos" or trapped in difficulties.Among them,the protagonist Del finally fled her hometown and became a writer.She was a typical existentialist figure who broke free from loneliness and rebellion to pursue self and freedom.In the novel,the writer Del’s thinking about the absurd chance of the daily world,the alienation and predicament of the characters in the small town,the free choice and transcendence and so on are very consistent with the thought of existentialism philosophy.These themes apply not only to Del’s novels and Del’s life,but also to Munro’s other novels and Munro’s own life:rational,definite regions can never strangle this mundane and complex world,but people always have the freedom to choose and transcend.Based on the above,this paper attempts to analyze the existentialist theme and implication of the novel Lives of Girls and Women from the perspective of Sartre’s existentialism philosophy.The introduction first introduces the writer Munro and her creation,then summarizes the domestic and foreign research status of Lives of Girls and Women,and finally briefly describes the significance and research methods of this paper.The main body of the thesis is divided into three chapters to discuss the existentialist themes in Lives of Girls and Women,which are the absurdity and chance of the town,the alienation and predicament of the living beings in the town,and the free choice and transcendence of Del.The first chapter is the absurdity and chance of the small town.It analyzes the contingency,irrationality and meaningless of the small town world from three aspects:the complex town world,the omnipresence of violence and desire,the lack of faith and the meaning of life and death.The second chapter is the alienation and predicament of the living beings in the small town,analyzes the alienation of people’s interpersonal relationship and self-alienation in the small town society,and then reveals the difficulties faced by women in the alienated society.The third chapter is Del’s free choice and transcendence,from the three aspects of "refusing to deceive oneself,facing absurdity ","free choice,resisting absurdity ","giving meaning and surpassing absurdity ",this paper analyzes Del’s process from refusing religion,abandoning secular authority to finally growing into a writer.In Lives of Girls and Women,Munro through the eyes of the protagonist Del,through the absurd,meaningless truth of the world,revealed the conservative traditional cultural ideas of the small town world,pointed out the fact that all living beings are alienated from each other,conflict and accustomed to self-deception,showing Munro’s thinking about the living state of ordinary people.On the other hand,by introducing reflection on the plight of women’s survival in the alienated world,we can inspire people in the predicament to find a relatively positive trend of life through free choice and action.This is another important contribution of Munro’s novels to contemporary real life.