Confronting The Existent Predicament Of Human Beings

Until now in Australian literature Patrick White is one of the most famous writers and the only one who has been awarded the Nobel Prize for literature for "an epic and psychological narrative art which has introduced a new continent into literature" by Swedish Academy. His works have been translated into tens of different languages. It is White who did more than any other writers to put Australian literature on the international map. As one of the most important classical and realism writers, Patrick White has created a number of works and Voss is one of White’s masterpieces.Voss is the leading hero of Voss, who guided a team of explorers to the Australian desert, trying to conquering nature. But the expedition ended up with failure. Resorting to Carl Jung’s theory on psychology and character, the author of this thesis intends to analyze Voss from the perspective of figures’ character and get the conclusion that:character is complex and imperfect; character can not be defined as good or bad, kind or evil. The thesis argues that it is the character’s complexity and imperfection that lead to the failure of the expedition, which also imply the modern man’s dilemma.In White’s era, especially since two catastrophic world wars, with the development of productivity, science and technology, the material life of human being is becoming increasingly rich, but at the same time their spiritual life is getting unfortunately poor. Take Voss as the example. On one hand, the desert explorer, Voss, is the actual situation of the modern man who has no root, and does not believe in God any longer. He is lack of confidence to his own nature, and does not know how to get along with the external world, but the wanton and self-destructive request to the natural world. First of all from a secular perspective, people do not know how to maintain a good and balanced relationship with the external world. Voss’s failure and death supplies the failure and destruction of human being. On the other hand, modern western people have lost the religious beliefs with the progress of productivity, science and technology. People and societies are dominated and controlled by the concepts of materialism and positivism. Many people in the West represented by Voss have lost their thinking and understanding of the meaning of life. The whole society is bound up by endless nihilism. How to solve these problems facing our time has become the major concern of White and other sensible intellectuals.According to research on Voss, the thesis suggests that two ways of human salvation can be achieved:one is a secular path, namely we human beings change from the concept of subjectivity to the concept of intersubjectivity, which stresses the subject and object equality, and completely changes the relationship between our human being and the external secular world; the other one is the religious redemption path, namely people should have belief.Two methods have been employed in this thesis. One is the theory of character analysis to show the complexity and imperfection of human beings, so as to better understand the true state of human beings. The second method is the theory of intersubjectivity, which opens a breakthrough point, as to suggest a possible relationship between people and the world.