An Existential Analysis Of The Ballad Of The Sad Cafe

Carson McCullers is one of the shining stars of southern writers in the20thcentury American literature. The Ballad of the Sad Café is her first literary workintroduced into China. This novella mainly deals with the three main characters’grotesque love to each other, their hard quest for love and tragic ending. Ever since itspublication in1951, this novella has received warm discussion among literary criticsand scholars both home and abroad. Most of the literary critics put their attention tothe themes like “spiritual isolation”,“loneliness”,“gothic feature” and “southernculture elements” revealed in this novella, and others have studied its writingtechniques such as symbolism, metaphor and psychoanalysis. This thesis tries to studythe novella from the theory of existentialism.With the insight shed by existentialism, the author intends to offer a newinterpretation of The Ballad of the Sad Café. It will be done mainly through theexistential analysis of the natural and social environment around the café, the livingcondition and the experience of Miss Amelia Evans, and the inexplicable triangularlove among the three characters. Through the exploration, the author attempts to revealtwo themes of existentialism reflected in the novella. One is that living in an absurdworld, modern people have to encounter predicaments of existence and theirstruggling is futile; the other is Carson McCullers’s deep existential thinking andhumanistic concern about modern man’s pursuing of self-value and the meaning oftheir existence in this world through the complicated triangle love among the threemain characters.