Pilgrimage To Gain Self-knowledge Through The Cave

Robert Penn Warren is the only writer to have won a Pulitzer Prize for both fiction and poetry in American history. Though he has been dead for twenty years, with all his work behind him, he has still been considered as dean of American letters-indeed, the very embodiment of the restless and ravening American imagination. He is a deeply South-rooted writer and most of his works are about the South and Southerners and are marked by a Southern particularity that is deliberate, insistent, and unmistakable. Love and the exploration for self-knowledge are always the theme of his novels and poems.Warren's sixth novel The Cave, was published in 1959. After his long immersion in American history, he gave this new novel a contemporary setting. The story happens in the spring of 1955 and is set in a large Southern city and a small rural town in Tennessee. Jasper Harrick, eldest son of a once powerful blacksmith, Jack Harrick, under different unbearable pressures, becomes an obsessive cave-crawler. He feels that in the secure cave, he can relieve the pressure possibly imposed by his father or people in Johntown. From his conversion with his mother before cave-crawling, it is apparent that he goes to the cave seeking self-knowledge, to find out his identity and define himself. The Cave examines the impact of the entrapment underground of young man on a small Tennessee town. There is no way of knowing Jasper, or whether he was able to know himself. But it is on account of him, most of those who gather here, by some inexplicable pressure, are compelled to explore the cave of their own selves. Through the journeys of self-knowledge of the characters, Warren annotates the philosophic meaning of self-knowledge and the way to achieve self-knowledge and his exploration helps us to return to our lost unity and to construct the harmonious society.This thesis focuses to analyze the characters and the cave image to show how the happenings at the cave finally lead to self-knowledge and knowledge of others. It consists of five parts, including three chapters between the introduction and the conclusion. The first chapter introduces that the historical background and the personal experience that enable Warren's eternal quest for self-knowledge; the essential significance of self-knowledge and the way to gain self-knowledge. Through this chapter we can learn about some basic theories of Warren about self-knowledge so that we can better understand The Cave.The second chapter mainly analyses the exploration of the inner cave of several main and minor characters in their pilgrimage for self-knowledge. Jasper Harrick's entombment in the cave actually implies that most people, trapped in their narrowness of themselves, are eager to explore and break out of their imprisoning selves. Next, I analyze how Jack Harrick, with the help of Brother Sumpter and Celia Hornby, achieves self-knowledge, though with misery; how Nicholas Papadoupalous, the person who lacks sense of belonging, achieves self-knowledge in an epiphany and how Isaac Sumpter's unfulfilled exploration leads to self-imprisonment and lose himself in the world of materialism.The third chapter mainly talks about the symbolic meaning of the cave in facilitating to express the theme—search and discovery for self-knowledge. The cave is most directly related to Plato's well-know parable of the cave, three paragraphs from The Republic (Book VII) are quoted in the epigraph, which gives us the first clue to the interpretation of the novel. The shadow of Sigmund Freud falls across the novel and the cave has the particular connotations of womb and tomb which Freudian theory has taught us to attach to it; the cave is symbolic of life and death, and related to our mother earth's womb from which we all spring and the tomb to which we return, thereby, being both the first and the last dwelling place. The cave also indicates the psychological and emotional emptiness in human beings as well as the yearning for fulfillment of love, companionship, kinship and consolation. Finally, there is also evidence to show that the cave has the implication of Jesus Christ's tomb, a place for salvation and resurrection; Due to Jasper Harrick's entombment, most people are compelled to make self-excavation and saved in the process; Jasper Harrick is resurrected in a sense through his brother Monty and his stillborn son.In general, The Cave is a novel, in which most of the characters are able to distinguish substance from shadow, reality from fancy. They are able to break out of the prison walls of selfishness and materialism that once confined them in darkness and come out into the open bright sunlight, confessing their sins, asking pardon, gaining self-knowledge and amending their lives.