An Intertextual Study Of John Steinbeck's The Winter Of Our Discontent

John Steinbeck is one of the most prominent writers in the 20 th century.His masterpiece The Grapes of Wrath won him The National Book Award and Pulitzer Prize in 1940.And in 1962 he gained The Nobel Prize laureate.Over nearly four decades of writing career,Steinbeck produced a body of works-including novels,short stories,screenplays,journals,essays,and newspaper and magazine articles.His works mainly concern the life of the lower class in America and have a strong flavor of critical realism.The novel The Winter of Our Discontent was published in 1961 which marked as the last fiction of John Steinbeck.It tells a moral fable which depicts a modern everyman's corruption and final redemption.Many scholars abroad have analyzed the novel from various perspectives,but due to its popularity in China is not as good as The Grapes Of Wrath,there are only a few researches done on it at home.The author of this thesis tries to analyze The Winter of Our Discontent from the perspective of intertextual theory,which includes the analysis of the novel's intertextual relations with the Bible,Malory's Le Morte d' Arthur,the writer's life experiences and the historical background.Combined with the close reading of the novel,the intertextual perspective will help the reader to understand the motif,narration and characterization while revealing the quintessence of the novel.This thesis contains six parts.They are the introduction,four main parts and the conclusion.In the introduction,it briefly introduces the main plots of The Winter of Our Discontent and the lifespan of the writer.At the same time it also presents the literature review and the significance of the study.The first chapter is the theoretical framework of the thesis.It expounds the origins,the proposition and the development of intertextual theory.The theory originates from Saussure's ideas on the linguistic signs and Bakhtin's dialogism.Then Julia Kristeva has combined them and added her thinking in putting forward the term “intertextuality”.After that the theory of intertextuality has been improved and developed by Gerard Genette.The intertextual theory holds that all texts are intertexts and puts forward the concept of text in its large sense.It believes that the society,history and culture all serves as the text in its large sense.And its basic research method is to trace the intertexts of the literary works and analyzes the functions and implications of these intertexts.In that sense it will make the readers better understand and appreciate the literary works.The second chapter discusses the novel's intertextual relations with the Bible.In the first section,the author of this thesis discovers that the stories of Ethan and Marullo's corruption and last redemption have corresponded to the U-shaped narrative structure which is put forward by Northrop Frye in The Great Code.In the meantime through analysis of the differences and similarities of Ethan and Marullo's U-shaped fate,we can see Steinbeck's anxiety about the corrupted world and also his sincere hope for the humanity;the second section has analyzed three major biblical images in the novel.They are “the light”,“the Judge Deborah” and “Judas' betray”.The third chapter explores the intertextual relations with Malory's Le Morte d' Arthur.Through tracing Steinbeck's special attachment to Malory's Arthurian tales,we can see his eagerness in reviving the Arthurian gallantry to his modern readers.Steinbeck has integrated this eagerness in composing The Winter of Our Discontent and made a “grotesque Sir Lancelot”-Sir Ethan Allen Hawley.And from comparing their deed of betrayal and Ethan's pursuit of American Dream and Lancelot's Holy Grail quest,we can see Steinbeck's profound satire upon the American way of life.The fourth chapter presents the novel's intertextual relations with the history.In the first section,it mainly analyzes the functions of Steinbeck's intersection of notorious Quiz Show Scandal in the novel.And the second section has analyzed the implications of Steinbeck's intersection of some historical facts of American whale fishery in the novel.The conclusion part denotes that through analyzing the interrelations between The Winter of Our Discontent and the Bible,Le Morte d' Arthur and some historical facts,the themes and characterization of the novel will be better grasped and appreciated.As a textual theory,the theory of intertextuality not only reveals all the texts is relational and also helps the researcher to form a divergent thinking habit.The studies of literary texts must take their background knowledge into consideration.In that way it will not only enrich the interpretations of the literary texts but also resolve the puzzles that we encounter in the reading.