Escapism And Pursuit

William Somerest Maugham is a modern well-known British novelist and playwright. Maugham was born in Paris, and studied in the University of Heidelberg in Germany later. Because of his own life experiences and the impact of popular philosophy in Europe at that time, it laid a solid foundation for Maugham subsequent literary style of writing and the impact of Maugham's life philosophy. In addition, Maugham has experienced two world wars, and the entire Western world was filled with confused sense, strangeness, painful sense, loneliness, absurd sense and paradox sense etc. The two world wars led Maugham started to question the modern western civilization. Therefore, a large number of literary works of Maugham were fully permeated with escapism from modern western civilization, and the desire of seeking freedom, spiritual salvation, and reconstruction of spiritual home. This thesis uses the philosophy of existentialism, combined of Maugham's long stories and short stories in-depth analysis in order to deeply understand the escapism and explore the root of the causes, which led us to think about the life, the society, own existence reflect, and how to beyond ourselves to create the perfect realm of life.This thesis put the escapism and the pursuit as main line by summarizing and analyzing Maugham's work, with Sartre's existential philosophy. This thesis is divided into three parts to explain: The first part is to discuss the escapism from western civilization. This part discusses the escapism from the religion, the physical, the marital and the human nature by classification, generalization and analysis of Maugham's long stories and short stories. The second part is to discuss the path of spiritual pursuit of Maugham. Maugham expressed the desire strongly to escape from the real world and seek spiritual salvation as well. He longed to find a habitat for the spirit and the true spirit of self-sustenance, and reflected his wish to return to nature also. This part is described from the following three aspects: The pursuit of spiritual home, the pursuit of Oriental Culture and the pursuit of the meaning of life. Maugham found his spiritual haven to escape from this world in his search. The third part is to discuss the idea of the root causes of Maugham. This part is described from the following two aspects: The first is the age source. The natural science development and the production of naturalistic forced people to reacquaint the existing world. The Western traditional values system collapsed so that western people were involved in the unprecedented crisis of faith. The money concept and the material concept were in an unprecedented crazy state. Money has become all the tools to dominate the world. The Western powers carved up the world market, which has led to the outbreak of World War. The two world wars had deepened the disaster of people's mental crisis. The second is the impact of his personal experiences. The unfortunately life experience of Maugham also formed his pessimism.