On Neil Simon's Comedies

Neil Simon(1927-)is the most famous comedy writer in Broadway after World War II.He won several prominent drama awards worldwide such as Pulitzer Prize and Tony Awards and has far-reaching impact on contemporary British and American playwriting.His play writing is typical of unique style,rich content and deep literary and social values.His writing presents a modernistic standpoint resulting from his life full of frustrations,his multiple identity of marginalization,and his vague recognition of nature of the world.Meanwhile,this standpoint is highlighted by his Jewish writing style of obscurity and sublimations about Jewish factors at the super organic level and universal meaning.He focuses on the “silent majority”,namely,the urban middle class in the United States,portraying a world of wilderness and some borderline persons involved such as the losers and the outcasts of the society employing his rich comedy techniques.He sketches a modern American city of mixed laughter and tears through abundant images,reflecting his comic style of mixed tragic and comic factors and his comic spirits of mixed humor and sadness.As the researches at home and abroad show that the critics mostly study Simon's comedy from the perspectives of theme,gender study,ethnic study,Broadway study.Researchers tend to investigate and explore his work in combination with the author's life in the aspects of downtown life,art of humor,feminist consciousness,homosexual theme,American dream,Jewish religion,midlife crisis and antimainstream movement,considering the fact that most of his works are autobiographic.The above-mentioned studies are positive,especially the underlying attention to features of Modernity,Jewishness and Duality of Tragedy and Comedy,but generally speaking such research is not systematic because it overlooks the logical relationship among the three aspects mentioned above,and lacks sufficient literary values both in depth and width.Therefore the multi-dimensional nature of Simon's comic art and its practical significance are not fully explored and explained.On this account,this thesis studies the Modernity and Jewishness in Simon's comedy,and probes into their nature,representation and mutual relations.Starting from the comic discourse,it unveils the duality of tragic and comic factors in the form,structure and aesthetic values of Simon's comedy based on the related discussion of modernity and Jewishness and the modern drama theory connected with modernist literary criticism,psychoanalysis,psychoanalytic criticism,comedy and tragedy criticism,modern narrative criticism,cinematographic adaptation and literary criticism,and deeply analyses the concrete expression of the Duality of Tagedy and Comedy,the historic origin and the hidden attitude of the author's life belief and his standpoint of writing by the relevance of the Duality of Tragedy and Comedy in the systematic description on Simon's comedy at the level of images,structure and aesthetic feeling.On this basis,we can have a close look at the comic nature of his comedy and appreciate the comic spirit in concord with the essence of life he pursued.Therefore,this paper has made breakthroughs in the exploration,presentation and synthesis of the previous studies,which lacks systematic research,and probed into the Modernity,Jewishness and Duality of Tragedy and Comedy of Simon's drama in Simon's drama from a global perspective,which is also a new point of view in the study of his comedy all over the world.Likewise,this paper starts its argumentation of Simon's comic art characteristic from the above three respects.First of all,it discusses the “modernity” in the artistic formality of Simon's comic art and gives an interpretation of his social experience,awareness and responsibility under the background of new times.Summarizing the seriousness,modernity and humanitarian spirit in his creative idea by presenting the interactive relation between Simon and modernist literature,this paper analyzes the reasons for his comic art formality and its specific characteristics through a thorough analysis of the modernism factors in writing techniques,the modernity in creating characters and the wilderness in the comic structure.Thereby this paper demonstrates Simon's relevance of the evil nature of the modernization and industrialized civilization and his severe criticism on American society,shows his sympathy on the modern human who has come down to the social outcasts struggled in living predicament and psychological crisis,loss of discourse power,identity and mainstream position and expresses the author's desire to create a harmonious society in his comedy.Next,this paper studies the Jewishness in Simon's comedy,touching upon his thinking and analyzing on the issue such as the religion,culture and identity of Jewish,the massacre,thus indicates his obscure and paradoxical attitude toward Jewishness.The further analysis of the Jewish humor,Jewish character and structure in Simon's comic art highlights strong ethnic feeling in his creative ideas,showing his sympathy for his Jewish companies who lived in foreign countries suffering from unfortunate experience.In the meantime,he uses metaphor to compare the disaster of the Jewry with the living predicament faced by the human kind.In the end,this paper studies the tragic matters,the duality of joy and sorrow,the nature of the comedy in the artistic form of Simon's comedy in accordance with the studying method conducted from external to internal,and then summarizes Simon's comic style and thoughts.By means of portraying the tragic sufferings of human kind with emphasis,this paper demonstrate the seriousness in the author's creative writing.Meanwhile,restraining the continuing of tragic factors and shifting the sadness of aesthetic subject by means of multiple comic techniques,it shows the keynote of mixture of tragedy and comedy,so the author is able to observe the tragedy and the absurd reality from a comedic standpoint,to realize his rewriting of the non –ideal life and to express his pursuit of the harmonious world.In conclusion,this paper holds that Simon's comedy is closely related to his political position,culture,stratum,ethnic and ideology,and these factors are connected with each other so much so that they demonstrate his deep concerns and profound experience of the harsh reality in the American society.As a Jewish comedian,Neil Simons incarnates the modernity in his works by paralleling or overlapping the traditions,especially those of the Jewish,even by challenging or betraying it.He decodes the modernity in form with the artistic method of plain writing style and language imaging.Simons made a thorough observation on the various malpractices caused by the modernization of the western world and close relevance of the fear and frustration of human being under the huge pressure of time and environment,demonstrating their tragic destiny that confuses the people.Meanwhile,he explains the basic meaning of the Jewishness and depicts the unfortunate sufferings of the Jews who live in the modern environment and their mixed feeling of joy and sorrow when dealing with the world.On this account the thousands of years' Jews' sufferings are compared and extracted and created in the writing process to popularize its metaphysics and become a modernity problem of the human race.Simon's Jewishness is his Modernity from a specific point of view in some sense.He did not restrain himself in the traditional mode of comedy,instead he combines the joy-and-sorrow national characters of the Jewry with the basic nature of that of the modern comedy,taking advantage of strain caused by the relation between the Modernity and the Jewishness to construct his unique comedic art.By seizing the hidden punch line of things while observing the serious rational meaning and tragic essence inside the punch line with sobriety and intelligence,this paper reflects the tragic theme using comedic brushwork.It is the continuous appearance of Simon's awareness of sorrow and joy that makes it possible for him to analyze human's tragic suffering with wisdom and calmness,which transcends the comical features externally to the profound comic nature of the comedy.This paper proceeds from the discourse,combines the intensive reading of the text with the explanation of the theory and employs study method that connects the synchronic research and diachronic research.It conducts comprehensive research on the meaning and senses of Modernity,Jewishness and Duality of Tragedy and Comedy in form,to demystify the thematic sense the author reveals.Consequently it has significant reference value in the systematic and comprehensive study on Simon home and abroad.At present,domestic studies on Simon are on its initial stage,thus this paper not only provides a perspective in the discussion of Modernity,Jewishness and Duality of Tragedy and Comedy in form,but also offers implications for further exploration into Simon's works in China.