On The Hero’s Identity In Martin Eden From The Perspective Of Critical Discourse Analysis

Martin Eden is the most successful and influential novel of Jack London. It is regarded as a novel of semi-autobiography of the author himself. Since its publication, it has got attention in the society. It depicts how Martin Eden rose himself from the lower class and gained success. He dreamed to be a writer after exposed to the intelligence and knowledge of the upper class. Although he was successful at last, he can not stand the cruel reality of bourgeois society and chose to commit suicide. On his way to success and doomed death, he continually questions and then establishes his identity. He establishes his identity in the upper class and fails to reconstruct his identity after his dream disillusioning.Critical Discourse Analysis aims to analyze and explore the relationship between discourse and ideology through the language forms. The relationship includes how ideology affects the discourse and how discourse reflects one’s ideology and its influence on ideology. Although there are mainly three ways to analyze the discourse and social structure, the most important theoretical foundation and analyzing method comes from Halliday’s Systemic Functional Linguistics which is also the analyzing method of this paper. Systemic Functional Linguistics becomes a tool for Critical Discourse Analysis. Halliday believes that all culture will reflect in the language some metafunction of universal significance. These metafunctions include ideational function, interpersonal function and textual function. In Fowler’s opinion, the systemic functional linguistics concepts applied in Critical Discourse Analysis mainly include lexical classification, transitivity, polarity, modality, nominalization, etc. Critical Discourse Analysis analyzes the ideological meaning hidden in the discourse mainly by using these theories.The previous studies under the perspective of Critical Discourse Analysis mainly focuses on news materials and famous speeches. Critical Discourse Analysis seldom focuses on literature discourse. Therefore, the author chooses Martin Eden as the material to analyze the hero’s identity and hidden ideology in the novel from the perspective of Critical Discourse Analysis. By the approach of Critical Discourse Analysis, the paper focuses on the hero’s identity and attempts to further reveal the relationship between Martin Eden’s personal development and the whole society. According to the development of the hero’s identity, the author divides the novel into five parts and chooses certain examples from each part which are used to analyze the construction of the hero’s identity. Word2003has been used to calculate and help to analyze words and phrases applied to the theories. Analysis method is based on Halliday’s Systemic Functional Grammar. By analyzing lexical classification, transitivity, polarity, modality and nominalization appeared in the novel to explore the relation between discourse and hero’s identity, to analyze if language has influence on the hero’s identity and to discover if there are connections between language and social background as well as social development. The analysis of hero’s identity includes individual identity, cultural identity and ethnic identity.Through the analysis of this paper, the author finds that Critical Discourse Analysis can be used to analyze literary works. There are mutual influences between language and one’s identity. The author also finds that the use of language can reveal the social background and ideology at that time. Martin Eden is a character with strong individualism, so his continuous strive and final disillusionment is full of the color of tragedy. Under the approach of Critical Discourse Analysis, the paper also offers a new perspective to analyze the development of the hero’s identity and doomed death in the end.