Initiation Story Study On The Confessions Of Nipper Mooney

This thesis takes the original English novel The Confessions of Nipper Mooney written by the contemporary Canadian novelist Ed Kavanagh as its research object. The discipline guiding this study is comparative literature and world literature. The thesis identifies the literary genre of this novel in the framework of “initiation story”, tracing the literary tradition of “initiation story”, and then using its theory and relative studies to analyze the growth story of the protagonist Nipper Mooney in The Confessions of Nipper Mooney. The focus is first on its growth story including the hero’s characteristics,his growth environments and the key events he has been through, and then, its writing features such as the plot development pattern, literary structure and writing techniques.This thesis takes an English novel The Confessions of Nipper Mooney as the research objective.(This English novel has not yet been translated into Chinese.) The thesis first discusses the grow-up story portrayed in the novel by placing it in the theoretical frame work of “initiation story”, and also by viewing it from other academical disciplines such as the psychological and sociological perspectives. Despite the purpose of interpreting this novel as an initiation story the thesis also wishes to broaden the studies of initiation story, to utilize study advantage of comparative literature, that is, cross-nation, cross-culture, and cross-language, and to increase understanding and communication between China’s and Canada’s literature in today’s increasingly globalized age.The thesis is divided into five parts: introduction, chapter one, chapter two, chapter three, and the conclusion. The introduction summarizes the content and the meaning of the study. Chapter one combs the initiation stories’ common rules and traits, summarizes the development history of initiation stories in west countries, and defines the Confessions of Nipper Mooney as an initiation story according to the features it shows. Chapter two offers a close-reading and in-depth study to the novel by tracing the hero’s growth journey or his tough experiences from three perspectives. Chapter three studies the novel’s writing features by probing its narrative perspective, plot development pattern and open ending. The part of conclusion is a summary about the study of The Confessions of Nipper Mooney.