On Self-identity In Carson McCullers' Novels

This thesis studies on three main works of Carson McCullers: The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter (1940), The Ballad of the Sad Cafe(1943) and The Member of the Wedding(1946).Carson McCullers is a unique woman writer in southern America at 20^th century. In her short lifetime, she did not create much literary works, but she wholeheartedly devoted herself to the creation of her "spirit isolation" field. She lives in a time when modernization is sweeping across the whole world. It not only provides its people a chance to identify their own strength, but also brings along spiritual confusion, resulting from totally new knowledge framework and hollowness in people's minds. The uncertain relation enforces the people to re-examine, re-evaluate and re-identify all the things. It directly affects the harmony and peacefulness of human's inner heart. What's more, modernization arouses people's awareness of self-identification, but its resulting confusion in self-identification could not find a way out at that time. Self-identification, as a value judgment, is a meaningful scale. If confusion arises, individual has to return to the situation of further isolation.This thesis is divided into three parts and it focuses on the crisis and pursuit of self-identification of every character in the three books from the angle of modernization. It aims to analyze the essence of abnormal people's spiritual isolation in Carson McCullers's works. After close reading and theoretical analysis of the three books, the Author of this thesis tries to discuss the fulfillment of self-identification and the effect of factors such as sex, society and economy on self-identification and to show how the abnormal characters recognize self-identification crisis and how to pursue stable and true self-identification bravely. This thesis inspires its readers to find the solution to self-identification crisis, and therefore shows Carson McCullers's idea of undefeated and undefeatable human spirit. The vague sense of belonging and ambiguous sense of identity is the trend in modern society. However, self-reflection gives new hope for our human being.