Research On The Redemption Narration In John Updike’s Novels

John Updike is a famous contemporary American realistic novelist,whose novels pay special attention to people’s spiritual beliefs,especially the spiritual plight and the decline of religious belief of the American middle class in the context of postmodernism.His novels have a wide range of themes including the historical theme,the family theme,the marriage theme,the exotic culture theme,the mythology them and so on.But these themes are all selected on the basis of people’s spirit and belief.The cultural changes of America in the last century can be seen from many of his novels.Under the impact of rationalism and consume culture,people’s spiritual beliefs gradually declined and resulted in serious social consequences.For example,people gave up their belief in God in order to fulfill their material demand,indulged in debauchery to fill the spiritual emptiness,or even took drugs,joined the cult and resorted to extreme ways such as suicide to mask the extreme spiritual emptiness in pursuing the transient excitement.This historical and cultural context is not only the starting point of Updike’s redemption narration,but also the foothold of his novels’creation intention.However,in the process of being read and accepted.Updike’s religious redemption intention is often obscured or even misinterpreted because of its narrative characteristics which are different from traditional realist narration.But ordinary readers often fail to see Updike’s redemption intention implied in the novel.And instead,they tend to talk about the sexual description in the novel and the random sex lives of the town couples,and even regard Updike as a pornographic novelist.In addition,some other researchers hold that even if Updike’s description of the spiritual"wasteland" after the loss of belief in God can be seen from his hovels,the author’s opinion about how to deal with this phenomenon and how to get out of the spiritual wasteland can not be found in the novel,much less the author’s opinions about how to solve the plight,which also caused many controversies of the critical circle to question that Updike had "nothing to say".From analyzing the controversies about Updike’s novels,and analyzing his novels’ narrative characteristics and its formation,especially the influence of S.Kierkegaard and Karl Barth’s theology on Updike’s novel creation,this dissertation researches the religious connotation of Updike’s novel narration and how to artistically transform the intention of religious redemption into novel narration.Through these researches,we hope to deeply interpret the deep reasons for the controversies about his novels so as to eliminate misreading and help readers to understand more accurately the deep connotation of Updike’s novels.This dissertation falls into six parts.The part of introduction summarizes Updike’s life and writing experience and points out that Updike’s novel writing is different from traditional realistic novel,his core creation intention is the religious redemption,his novel narration is closely related to religious redemption,which consequently form his unique novel narrative form with thorough religious connotation.The first chapter discusses the starting point and realistic causes of Updike’s redemption narration,that is,the cultural plight and people’s spiritual plight caused by the loss of belief in God in American society.Through disclosing the modern"illusions" of priests’ dereliction of duty,of regarding sex as one kind of emergent religion and of substitution of belief in God by films,this chapter examines and criticizes the current situation of American religious belief.The second chapter discusses the contextualizing narration,the first form of the forms of redemption narration.In accordance with the fear and dilemma of Kierkegaard’s theology’s contextualizing narration,the part analyzes the moral dilemma of Updike’s "Trilogy of Scarlet Letter" and marriage novels,researches how Updike artistically transform a realistic plight to the human’s situation in religious sense,and explores in religious sense how to solve the plight,for example explores the new gender relationship.The third chapter discusses the tragedy narration,the second form of redemption narration.In accordance with Kierkegaard’s reinterpretation of traditional tragedy from the Christian aspect and its profound impact on Updike’s novel creation,this part differentiates Updike’s novels’ tragedy and the traditional tragedy,emphasizing the religious connotations of the tragedy and the structure of the tragedy are built on the basis of human beings’ betray against God in the framework of human-God relationship,and the despair caused by its tragedy is the route to rebuilding the human-God relationship and gaining spiritual redemption.Combining Updike’s novels’ text,this chapter discusses the comic expressing form of tragedy,the novels’ theme of death,theme of desire and expounds the cultural critical function of the tragedy.The fourth chapter discusses non-authority narration,the third form of redemption narration.This chapter puts forward that Updike’s novels’ non-authority narration has religious connotations and redemption intention.And this part is intended to construct the direct conversation and communication between readers and novel text through this narration so as to stimulate the religious consciousness and capability of the readers.Through analyzing the novel text,this chapter expounds the concrete manifestation of non-authority from the perspective of monologue narration,image shaping of anti-hero and trivializing narration.At the same time,this part also researches the important role of the dialogue design in reflecting the inner activities of the characters and the relationship between the "aphasia" and "dislocation" of dialogues and religious belief.The conclusion summarizes the full text and concludes that Updike achieved the purpose of redemption of his novels through three narrative modes of contextualizing narration,tragedy narration and non-authority narration.The redemption narration of the novels unfold through the three narrative modes,which assume different functions and are unified in the overall narrative intention of redemption.This dissertation analyzes the three narrative modes,interprets the effects of the spiritual redemption,and illustrates that Updike’s novel creation is not a personal twitter,and his novels are full of his concerns and thinking about the realistic society and the situation about people’s spiritual belief and possess strong artistic consciousness while conveying redemption intentions.