On The Picaresque Theme In Le Clézio's Works

Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio, a famous French writer, won the Nobel Prize in literature on October.9,2008. He was born in 1940 in Nice and was grown up there. His ancestors migrated to Mauritius from a country of Brittany, France. Le Clézio has traveled to a lot of countries. As he was influenced by his ancestors, he traveled to tribes of India in Maxico and Panama several times. In the works of Le Clézio, we can find that he doesn't like modern civilization, and we can also find that he yearns for the lifestyle of primitive tribes in Africa and South America. Although he has both French and Mauritian nationality, he regards Mauritius as his really motherland and French as a motherland that he chose just for culture and language. We can find that he doesn't like western civilization in his heart. He is a writer which takes a sceptical and dismissive attitude to western civilization. It is because of the special experience of him that he chose picaresque theme as the theme of his works and his experience also endows the image of vagant with the features of diversification and peculiarity.This thesis focuses on picaresque theme in the works of Le Clézio and it also discusses the inheritance and subversion of picaresque novel. This thesis consists of six parts. The first part is the introduction of this paper. From the second part to the fourth part, picaresque theme in the works of Le Clézio will be discussed in three aspects. The second part is the analyse of the theme of religionary picaresque theme.The vagrancy of Jew and Muslem will be discussed in this part. The third part is a discussion of the vagrancy of people in ex-colonial countries. The imperialistic countries has hurt the people in Third World too much, and Le Clézio depicted the vagrancy of these people a lot in his works. The theme of spiritual exile in the work of Le Clézio is discussed in the next part. Although the world's material civilization is highly developed, the spirit of human is getting lost. Le Clézio has figured a lot of modern human which are well-off materially but vacuous spiritually. By depicting the experience of these people, Le Clézio not only analysed the reason why they lost themselves but also told us how modern people could find their homeland again. He also showed us a bright future of human in his book. The fifth part is a general introduction of picaresque theme in the works of Le Clézio and the figure of vagrant in picaresque novels. The last part is a conclusion of this thesis.