A Study Of Black Humor--Background, Origin, Themes, Narrative Strategies And Artistic Techniques

Black humor, an important western literary form, has jumped to spotlight in America in the 1960's. Its advent helps fill the then low tide of the literature with energy. Black humor literature mainly involves novels. In American literature, the term "black humor" is associated with a group of novelists, including John Barth, Thomas Pynchon, Joseph Heller, Ken Kesey, Bruce Jay Friedman, William S. Burroughs, and Kurt Vonnegut. On the basis of the review of current studies concerning black humor, the thesis provides an overall study of black humor, including black humor's background, origin, themes, narrative strategies and other artistic techniques.The thesis consists of three sections. The first section mainly discusses the background of black humor. The key issue of the social background is the influence of World War II on the social and cultural climate of America. Black humor works combined a frenetic comic exuberance with a profound sense of alienation, despair, and absurdity. Countering the optimism that is often thought to characterize the Eisenhower and Kennedy eras, black humorists trained a cynical eye on America's sense of euphoria and omnipotence following its victory in World War II, ridiculing the ascendancy of complacent idealism and a consumer culture. Not only the social and cultural climate that resulted from World War II, but also two schools of thoughts influenced profoundly black humor and even American literature development. Freudian theory endows novelists with the necessary recognition of psychoanalysis, which enables the novelists to let readers sense the existence of psychoanalysis in protagonists' very personality. Absurdity advocated by existentialism comes to be one of the themes of black humor novels.The second section provides a picture of the current research on black humor, which helps establish the proper foundation and standpoint of my study.The third section centers on an overall study of black humor, which covers the origin, the themes, the narrative strategies and the other artistic techniques of black humor novels.Whether we judge the origin of black humor from the standpoint of theme or ofprotagonists, one thing is certain: it really originates from something non-American. Evidence can be obtained from Voltaire's Candide and the schtel tradition of Jewish literature.The unique glamour of the narrative strategies of black humor is reflected in its use of tautological dialogue, illogical cause-and-effect relationship, wrenched cliche, comic reversal, the comic and the tragic juxtaposed, and anti-climax disposal of paragraphs.Black humor novelists abandon the traditional doctrine of storytelling, purposefully break some grammatical confines to employ artistic techniques such as black humor, discontinuity, burlesque, and repetition. With a cynical attitude toward writing their novels, they created in their novels exotic sites, loose and absurd plots, comical and ridiculous characters and intelligent and biting language. With marrying the comic with the tragic, they accomplish a lot in the ups and downs of American literature.All in all, the very fact that the thesis focuses its attention on the cause of formation of black humor and on the overall study of black humor helps make the study a little bit more meaningful than former ones.