A Study Of Tropological Models In American Postmodern Novel Loon Lake

As a popular candidate for the Nobel Prize in Literature, U.S. post-modernist writer E. L. Doctorow (1931-2015) has won great reputation of literature reviewers for his expertise in combining history with fiction. Among his reputable historical novels, Loon Lake is one of his early attempts in employing substantial post-modernist narrative strategies such as montage, collage, polyphony of narration in a multi-genre form. Centered on the Bildungsroman of a young man called Joe, the novel unfolds in the Great Depression period, presenting to readers the corruption of human identity, the desire for wealth and fame, and the perplexity about self-identity at that time.Veiled with obscure language, both readers and researchers find the novel arduous to comprehend. However, the trope theory put forward by Hayden White nevertheless gives an assisting support to the better understanding of the fiction. Each image, character and passage of the story clarifies its realistic significance under a close tropological research applied with four trope models:metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche and irony. Through a comprehensive tropological study on the images, motifs and the story-telling model including the narrative strategy and character development, the novel reveals its reflection on the problems and dilemma of society, human nature and the exhaustlessly passing history, and criticizes on the callousness of the rich as well as the evilness in human nature, thus endows itself with an admonishing significance of calling for the acquisition of a historical and moral consciousness to seek for the basic value of human being, to learn from the past and to remain humane.The thesis consists of six chapters. The first chapter makes an overall introduction on Doctorow the author, Loon Lake the novel, researches on the novel both at home and abroad, and a brief mention about the significance as well as the structure of the thesis; Chapter Two provides a theoretical basis of the thesis by outlining the trope theory put forward by Hayden White; Chapter Three focuses on the tropological images in the novel including Loon Lake, Fanny the fat lady (a retarded woman in the freak carnival) and the loon's dive respectively indicating wealth and isolation, human innocence, the corruption in human identity; Chapter Four brings the research to a broader sense by analyzing two motifs in the novel, the search for father as a synecdoche of search for self-identity, and the success of the protagonist as an irony of American Dream; Chapter Five is a more integrated consideration of the macro model of the novel, encompassing the model of narrative strategy, in which the mixture of different genres/voices and the application of computer language tropologically indicate the chaos in modern society, and the model of character development, in which Joe and Penfield are the incarnation of boyhood adventure and idyllic romance respectively. The last chapter concludes with a sublimation of novel's realistic significance.