Love, Sacrifice, Displacement

John Hoyer Updike (1932-2009) is one of the remarkable prolific American writers. Since thepublication of his first volume, The Poorhouse Fair, Updike has published nearly50volumes. Among hisextraordinary achievements, Rabbit Tetralogy is generally acknowledged as the embodiment of Updike’stalent and wisdom in his literary career and The Centaur has won him the National Book Award. TheCentaur is the contrast of Rabbit, Run. Updike wanted to tell two different attitudes of life through the twonovels, one of the attitudes is like rabbit: fleeing away and the other is like a horse: to continue no matterhow heavy the burden is.The plot, which combined the Greek myth and the reality together, is not complex anyway. It mainlytells the love for a father to his son.Based on archetypal theory, this paper tried to analyze the archetypal pattern, the archetypal charactersand archetypal images and their displacement in The Centaur. Updike displaced the ancient myth to fit thefast-changing modern society in the late20thcentury. This paper consists of six chapters.Chapter One is the introduction. Updike’s literary career and literary review are introduced in thischapter.Chapter Two mainly introduces the theory basis—Northrop Fry’s archetypal theory, particularly theliterary archetype and the definition of displacement.Chapter Three, Four and Five are the body.Chapter Three mainly talks about the archetypal symbols—Old Buick which corresponds to the lifejourney of Caldwell, Olinger corresponds to the Olympus and the psoriasis corresponds to the wound ofPrometheus. This Chapter aims to analyze the connection and the coincidence in each group.Chapter Four mainly talks about the archetypal characters—Caldwell who corresponds to Chiron,Peter who corresponds to Prometheus and Zimmerman who corresponds to Zeus. This chapter not onlydiscussed the connection in each group but also contrasted each two.Chapter Five is about the archetypal motifs, mainly the motif of quest and the love-death-rebirth motif.The motif of love in this chapter was divided into two parts, by the resistance between love-devotion andlove-rejection, the motif of death has been dug out and finally the characters in the novel had understoodeach other then they got the rebirth.Chapter Six is the conclusion. Caldwell accepted the arrangement of destiny and continued his life in away of sacrifice to his son and his family, physically alive and mentally died.