Struggle And Transcendence:The Existential Predicament Of Antiheroes In The Novels Of John Updike And Liu Zhenyun

This paper intends to conduct a parallel study of existential predicaments of antiheroes in John Updike's Rabbit Tetralogy and Liu Zhenyun's Ground Covered With Chicken Feathers,The Work Unit,A Word is Worth Ten Thousand Words and I Did Not Kill My Husband from the viewpoint of thematology.This thesis will explore how American and Chinese antiheroes in these novels go through collective spiritual emptiness under the pressure of existence and how they struggle against their existential crisis and seek for the transcendence,promoting readers to reconsider deeply-felt living dilemmas of common life in the troubled second half of the twentieth century.By a closer inspection,more philosophical depth will be sought with regard to their suffering of loneliness,their alienation omnipresent in the net of power manipulated by society and a sad indictment of society that they are trapped in permanent state of struggle.Some of them yield to the growing existential pressure and drift with the current while the others transcend their living dilemmas and achieve authentic lives.In addition,this thesis will also investigate how Updike and Liu are involved in the revival of realism in their respective cultural background.They use post-modernist aesthetic techniques underlying in their realist portrayal of ordinariness of antiheroes to reconsider the nature of human condition.They reflect their spiritual crisis,their family strife and intense conflict and contradiction within the society.Their return to realism indicates the possibility of a resemblance among different historical phenomena and cultural backgrounds.Not only do they develop a view of contemporary life of antiheroes in postmodern society,but they push the boundaries of traditional realist literature in postmodern context.It is without doubt worthwhile to give more credit to authors like John Updike and Liu Zhenyun who manage to not only present their nations and their periods,but to put their works into a greater perspective of ordinary lived experience in the contemporary world.A comparative study of the novels of Updike and Liu is definitely quite thought-provoking and could shed new light on the relations of American literature to Chinese literature,at least tentatively.