An Archetypal Analysis Of The Grapes Of Wrath

Northrop Frye said that in appreciating an artistic work, you should stand backwards. That is to say, you should manage the work wholly and cannot limit yourself to one aspect, character, image or narrative model in a work. Then you put this work in the environment diachronically and synchronically and look into the relationship and difference between the characters, images, themes and narration in this work with those of other works. At last you should try to find the similar or different archetypes. After you find the archetypes, you should progressively analyse the changed use of these archetypes in the work, then you connect the work with its creating history and cultural environment again and study why the author uses this kind of displacement. The archetypal criticism can include these aspects such as literature, myths, culture and history etc., and use its advantage of entirety. Therefore, if the reader wants to understand a literary work well, he must analyse the archetypes in the work against certain cultural background. Only through this, can the reader understand the real meaning of the work. According to Frye, as far as western literary tradition is concerned, two systems contribute to archetypes, that is, the ancient Greek myths and the Bible. This thesis begins with the archetypes of these two cultures, and then analyses the...