A Study On The Dialogicity Of The Crying Of Lot 49

The Crying of Lot 49 is one of the masterpieces written by the eminent American postmodern novelist master Thomas Pynchon. With the perspective of postmodernism, literary critics have long been conducting analyses and researches on this novel from multiple dimensions, such as narrative techniques, thematic analyses or linguistic angle. The variety of the literary criticism on the works as well as the pluralism of the angles of study fully displays the tension of the novel itself. However, very few scholars at home and abroad ever attempted to apply the dialogue theory proposed by M.M. Bakhtin, a famous philosopher and linguist of the Soviet Union, to carry out the dialogic study on the classic piece. In the present thesis, the dialogue theory as the core principle of Bakhtinian carnivalization poetic theory and the polyphony novel theory by M.M. Bakhtin, will be comprehensively applied to discuss the dialogicity of the great works.To begin with, in the thesis the background of the novel—the American society in the 1960s is to be analyzed, and the dialogic subjects composed by different characters and cultural subjects will be identified by reviewing the experiences of the female protagonist in the course of executing the will, and thus the dialogic features of these subjects which are displayed in the mutual communication and collision will get analyzed. Secondly, in the author's unique postmodernism creation techniques, the diversity of dialogic styles of the works will be explored. And finally, through reexamining the implications of the dialogic subjects and the creation features, the dialogic spirit of the works will be fully interpreted. To summarize, with these dialogic features of the novel studied systematicly from three aspects of Bakhtinian dialogic theory, namely, dialogic subjects, dialogic presentations and dialogic spirit of the novel, this thesis will deepen the understanding of the creation purposes of the author, the creating characteristics and the spirit of the time reflected in the works, and then hopefully, it will provide a new perspective for literature scholars who are studying the novel of Pynchon and also provide some references for Pynchon study in the context of China. At the same time, it is of practically directive significance.