An Existentialist Interpretation Of Miranda’s Death In The Collector

The novel The Collector is one of John Fowles’ representative works, published in 1963. Once published, the novel won great success. However, this novel is controversial among the critics. They have totally different opinions on it. Some praised it as “the first-class novel”; some criticized it as “artificial and rough work”.In the novel, Fowles tells us a tragic story about a man who collects from butterfly to female. The novel is made up of four parts. The first part is from the perspective of the main character Clegg. Clegg admires a middle-class art student Miranda. After careful preparations, he kidnaps Miranda by drugging her with chloroform and locks her up in the cellar of his cottage. The second part of the novel is narrated by Miranda in the form of fragments from a diary that she keeps during her captivity. Miranda tries to escape several times, but she has never succeeded as Clegg stops her. Before she has chance and is able to escape, she becomes seriously ill and dies. The third part is told by Clegg. He wants to commit suicide after he finds Miranda died. In the last part, when he reads her dairy and realizes that she never loved him, he decides that he is not responsible and is better off without her. The book ends with his announcement that he plans to kidnap another girl.Most researches on this novel cover the topics of the ecologism, narrative methods and feminism and so on. This thesis attempts to interpret Miranda’s death in The Collector from the perspectives of existentialism.The thesis consists of four chapters apart from an introduction and a conclusion. In the introduction part, the thesis presents the life of John Fowles and summarizes the plot of the novel. Then, it moves on to the literature review at home and abroad. Finally, the central argument and main idea of this thesis is introduced briefly.Chapter One presents the origin, development and the core concepts of existentialism, and briefly summarizes Sartre’s existentialism important theoretic views from the aspects of “the world is absurd and being is painful” “freedom and choice” and “hell is others”. Chapter Two analyzes external cause for Miranda’s death — “the world is absurd and being is painful”. The outside absurd world has a great impact on Clegg’s abnormal personality, which finally makes Clegg form his own absurd world. That becomes the external cause for Miranda’s death. Chapter Three concerns the thought in existentialism, “freedom and choice” which is the internal cause for Miranda’s death. Miranda tries to make choices to change her life. However, at the same time, she goes to the inevitable death. Chapter Four explores another most important and significant existentialist thought “hell is others” as the essential cause for Miranda’s death. To analyze Miranda’s death is in this part, from the perspectives of the relationship between Miranda and others, the relationship between Clegg and others and the relationship between Miranda and Clegg.The Conclusion part is the last part of the thesis. There is a brief overview of the existentialistic theories and Sartre’s philosophy of existentialism in this part. It also summarizes Miranda’s death from the perspective of existentialism,which is interpreted in the thesis.