An Analysis Of The Characters' Spiritual Growing In Look Homeward, Angel By Decoding The "Door" Image

This thesis interprets Thomas Wolfe's classic novel Look Homeward, Angel from the perspective of Bildungsroman to summarize the new influence and significance of the landmark works for this type of writing. This paper tries to decode the "door" image for its symbolic meaning, namely the pursuit for self-discovery and self-realization, and deduce the characters' spiritual growth and cognitive maturity under the guidance of such pursuit. Thomas Wolf's own life and his other works provide a cross-sectional and longitudinal comparison for the spiritual growth research. Finally, the paper reaches a conclusion of "Room Theory", which describes that the process of growth is leaving one room for another room, in other words, the process of growth is a constantly advancing progress of integration between the man and the society. "Room Theory" serves as a new model to understand the nature of growth and theme of initiation story. I hope to follow the traditional perspective of analyzing image to study Look Homeward, Angel, and make a combination of symbolic meaning and growth theme to discover the new value of the classical novel. Instead of applying the general theory to analyze an individual work like other papers, my dissertation aims to generalize a new vivid model to explain traditional theory of Bildungsroman.