On The Bible Archetypes Of Andre Gide's Works

Andre Gide, the famous contermporary writer of France, he is admired as the spirit leader of French literary circles in the beginning of 20th century, by the abundance and diversity of his works, the complexity of his thought, even the particularity of his social background. The style of his writing is both full of"luxury of sense organ"and"enthusiasm of reason"(words form Bian Zhilin), refelecting to work is that there is a clear disintigration trend appearing on the thought and content of his works: on the one hand, he satirizes the hypocrisy and narrow of Christian church, and longs to use the way of looking down upon morality to break though the religion's repression to human nature, he aways wish to devote himself into the bosom of nature with matchless joy, and return to the original humanity, immensing in the plesure of sense organ; on the other hand, he doesn't abandon the thinking on religion problems. After the banquet of body enjoyment, he sincerely longs to dialogue with Christ directly crossing the Church of human world .From the past, because of Gide's overturning to tranditional morality and religion ,he got an image of brave Immoralist from the most critics.However, this is not the all of Gide, works such as The return of prodigal son, Saul, Bathsheba, Narrow gate and so on ,these are stories from Bible more or less, maybe it is reporting the religion complex in his soul.Northrop Frye thought, archetype is symbol, associative clusters, or recurring image,"The symbol in this phase is the communicable unit, to which I give the name archetype: that is , a typical or recurring image".The archetypal criticism theory is introduced into the reading of writers and works broadly.Based on the protestantism background of Gide and a great number of Bible vocabulary in his works, discussing the Bible archetype in his works can give us a believable explanation to Gide's conplicated attitude to religion.The Bible archetypes of Gide's works show in following aspects, firstly Old Testament can be understood as a travel, which is the Hebrew break away from the ruling of another nation and go away, return at last. The water, the light, the lily recur constantly in Bible , all these are appeared, reformed and rebuilt in Gide's work. The image of water symbolizes cleansing, rescuing, and newborn; the image of light symbolizes illumination, enlightenment, purifying; the image of lily symbolizes holy, loyal and virgin. The archetyps in characterization in Gide's works, such as Job, Holy mother mary, Sadan, are transplant from the characters of Bible, and are endowed with new meaning and time specific, which make these characters'multiple personality owning multiple variant.Gide also has been discussing the borrowing and deformation of U type narrative of Bible and relating to the plot arthetype which is the conflict of evil and good appearing in Gide's works. By using the archetypal criticism to analysis Gide's works, we discover that Gide is not a completely atheist, and not a Christian ,but a disciple of Christ, who wants to dialogue with Christ. He has been trying to use humanitarianism to build the bridge between God and free people.