A Study Of Alienation Dilemma In Everything I Never Told You From The Perspective Of Humanism

Celeste Ng is one of the important Chinese American writers in American society,who becomes very popular at home and abroad with the publication of her first novel Everything I Never Told You.Ng’s works focus on the living conditions of ethnic minorities and marginal people in society.Her writing style is mild and restrained,and she explores the relationship between people with a trivial story pattern.Everything I Never Told You tells the living dilemma of an Asian mixed-race family through the trival things in daily life.This thesis mainly takes Fromm’s humanism as the breakthrough point to deeply analyze the alienation performance of the protagonists in Everything I Never Told You,its causes and ways of salvation,and points out the pressure and challenges people face in modern society.As a representative of the Frankfurt School,Fromm reveals the universal alienation phenomenon in a capitalist society and researches this problem.His analysis expresses his concern and cogitation on the plight of human alienation.This thesis examines the alienation and suffering of the James’ through humanistic thought and strives to find a way out in the alienated world.This thesis consists of three parts: introduction,main body,and conclusion.The first part is the introduction.This part mainly includes the introduction of Celeste Ng and her work Everything I Never Told You and the research review at home and abroad,and points out the purpose and significance of analyzing the works from the perspective of Fromm’s humanism.The second part is the main body.The main part of the thesis consists three chapters:The first chapter analyzes the performance of the alienation dilemma.Firstly,the protagonists become marginals.In social life,James and Lydia are difficult integrating into society as Asians;in family,Marilyn’s demands are ignored by family members,and Nath and Hannah are ignored by their parents.Secondly,people are trapped into self contradiction.Marine falls into the contradiction between self-potential and short life,and Lydia is in the contradiction between life and death.Finally,the protagonists all become silent subordinates.Lydia has no courage to rebel her parents,and James and Marilyn follows the rules of society.These performances belong to the alienation of the relationship between man and man,man and society,and man and himself.The second chapter analyzes the reasons for the alienation dilemma.There are two main reasons for the alienation dilemma: family reasons and social reasons.The disharmony between husband and wife,the unbalanced love of parents for their children,and the estrangement between siblings constitute a complex family relationship.James,who lives in a white society as an Asian,has never been able to integrate into the white society truly.Although Marilyn is a white woman,she is still oppressed and discriminated against in terms of gender.These social discriminations also affect the alienation of characters.The third chapter analyzes the salvation ways of alienation dilemma.The broken family finally recognizes the reality and directly faces Lydia’s death.Then they build personal subjectivity and overcome obstacles through the love between family members,and then the family is out of alienation dilemma.Fromm believes that love is an effective way of treating human dilemmas.At the same time,people can enrich their existence value and achieve spiritual integrity by giving love.The last part is the conclusion.This part summarizes the above discussion and finds the way of salvation through the analysis of alienation embodiments and causes.It hopes to arouse people’s deep attention to the alienation dilemma of human existence in contemporary society,deepen people’s self-identity cognition and thinking about the harmonious relationship between family and society.It also provides reference for other inter-racial families to solve the problems of family conflict,children relationship,social discrimination and so on.