Images Of Protagonists In Sinclair Lewis's Four Top Novels--Main Street, Babbitt, Arrowsmith And Dodsworth

Sinclair Lewis, the first Nobel Prize winner, characterizes his writing by vivid description, strong control, and creation of new type of images with satire and wit and humor.Lewis presents his readers more than 20 novels, whose subjects are mainly confined to middle-class Americans. The conflicts they are experiencing are sarcastically revealed with the good intent of a better world. Plot is hardly the shining point of Lewis's novels. The overwhelming attraction lies in his depiction of various images, especially sharpened by his photographic documenting ability. Some images have long dwelled in people's mind and some have established themselves in American's daily vocabulary.This thesis aims to conduct a detailed study of four most creative images of protagonists in Lewis's four top novels to show their typicality, sociality and originality. The dissertation consists of four chapters and a conclusion part.Chapter 1 is a preface, in which there is an overall comment on Lewis's historical position, literary career and a brief introduction to the four images. Chapter 2 is devoted to the study of inner relationship between Lewis's psychograph and his creation of those images.Chapter 3 is the core of the dissertation, which is composed of three sections. In the first section, the historical, social and literary settings are discussed. The detailed and thorough analyses of the four images of protagonists are carried out in the second section. They are respectivelyCarol in Main Street, a brave young bride who faces the cultural conflicts with enthusiasm of reformation, and whose dream is still alive waving despite the final return to the parochial Gopher Prairie; Babbitt in Babbitt, the typical "TBM", who is in nature a conformist and doomed to be bounded but tries to escape and finds only failure; Arrowsmith in Arrowsmith, a young medical scientist with grand dream and determination in truth-seeking; and Dodsworth in Dodsworth, a rich, generous, considerate, diligent and down-to-earth car producer. This chapter ends up with analyses of the implied America presented through the images. Chapter 4 is the complement to Chapter 3 about the methods of depiction.A conclusion can be draw in the light of the previous chapters that a writer who paves the way and creates so many unique and typical images surely should win recognition and admiration from more people and possess a position he much deserves.