Walking Out Of The Spiritual Wasteland: A Socio-Psychological Study Of The Characters’Identities In Shepard’s Family Trilogy

Since the mid-1970 s, Shepard’s creative style has come to transfer from the experimentalism to the new realism. As his family trilogy: Cursing of Starving Class(1978), Buried Child(1978), and True West(1980) were published, he has become one of the most splendid playwrights on the stage of American Theater, as famous as Eugene O’Neil, Arthur Miller and Tennessee Williams. Shepard’s family plays do not directly criticize American society, while almost all his characters are its victims. From the perspective of the Social Psychological theory, this thesis mainly studies the characters’ loss and regression of identity in Shepard’s family trilogy.The first part of this thesis is a brief introduction which mainly explains current studies of Shepard’s family trilogy, and then presents the problem to be studied in this thesis. The second part of this thesis is the body part. Chapter one narrates the identity crisis existing in the three families: fathers’ degeneration, mothers’ escaping and the descendants’ loss of self. Chapter two centers on the two primary causes of characters’ loss of identity, which are social structure and the absence of necessary psychological needs. Chapter three focuses on how the characters achieve the regression of identity. The third part of this thesis is the conclusion which summarizes the main idea of each chapter and reiterates the argument of this thesis. Meanwhile, it reveals the practical significance of the identity study from the perspective of social psychological theory.