A Heartbreaking Carnival

Carson McCullers is a highly regarded writer in the twentieth century American literature. Her works include The Heart is a Lonely Hunter(1940), Reflections in a Golden Eye(1941), A Tree, A Rock, A Cloud(1942), The Ballad of the Sad Café(1943), and The Member of the Wedding(1946). Among them, The Ballad of the Sad Caféis her masterpiece, which was the first Carson McCullers's book to be introduced to China. Domestic Studies on The Ballad of the Sad Caféare mostly concerned about the theme of loneliness and love, the significance of creating the freakish characters, its feminism and homosexual dimension and so on.This thesis is an attempt to apply Mikhail Bakhtin's carnival theory to a study of the carnivalized charaeterization, the carnivalized plot, and the carnivalized theme which reveal the carnivalistic nature in the novel The Ballad of the Sad Café. All these elements form a carnivalized world in The Ballad of the Sad Café. In this world, the characters are composed of clown, fool, rogue and double images, and there is a carnival square built up which serves as the scene of the plot, where the carnival ritual of crowning and decrowning take place. This carnivalized world only remains for a period and then perishes, and thus is called"a carnival utopia".This thesis is divided into four chapters.Chapter One is a brief introduction to the author and the book, a brief surnmary of the plot, a review of other critics'studies on the book, and the objectives of the thesis.Chapter Two concisely elucidates Bakhtin's theory of carnivalization. .It includes the origin, the main features and elements, as well as some key concepts of the theory that are essential to the analysis of the following chapter.Chapter Three is the main body of the thesis, in which a thorough analysis of the carnivalization in The Ballad of the Sad Caféis unfolded. This chapter consists of three parts: the first part is the analysis on the carnivalized characters, including the dualistic image, the rogue and the clown; the second part analyzes the carnivalized plot, including the rituals of crowning and decrowning, the caféas the carnival square where the rituals take place, and the effect of the liquor. The third part deals with the carnivalized theme, a theme of subversion, ambivalence and transience.Chapter Four is the conclusion. This chapter sums up the major points of the whole thesis and affirms the parallels between Bakhtin's theory of carnivalization and the novella The Ballad of the Sad Café; it makes a further attempt to reveal that by constructing the carnivalized world McCullers is not only subverting the old social and ideological order but also embracing a new one that is regenerative, compassionate, so as to build the relationship across all the differences and confinements.