A Comparative Study Of Invisible Man And The Joy Luck Club From The Perspective Of Existentialism

Existentialism is a major ideological trend in modern western literature as well as a philosophical school based in Europe.As a literary motif,it entails a set of themes,which help reveal human reactions to the modern world;therefore existentialism became a very popular focus of literary criticism in the 19^th and 20^th centuries.However,the literary works critiqued from the perspective of existentialism have been those of modern literature mainly by European writers and writers from the American mainstream culture.Not much attention is given to literary works written by American ethnic minorities as embodiment of existentialism.For this reason,the author of this thesis sets out to compare two modern novels written by writers of different ethnic minorities and analyzes existential themes contained in two novels.One is Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison,an African American man and the other The Joy Luck Club by Amy Tan,a Chinese-American woman.The purpose of the study is to find out how the existential themes affect literature of American ethnic groups and whether there are similarities and differences between American blacks and Chinese-Americans in terms of existential conditions.Through the study,the three similarities,as a common theme of two works,which are the absurdity of the world,a sense of angst weighing down on the major characters and their dilemmas of identity.As for differences,the first has to do with cultural influences internalized by the Chinese-American women vs.individual will embodied in the nameless black man when it comes to decision making.The second difference lies in their struggles to cope with absurdity.The Chinese women show readiness to embrace mainstream American values whereas the nameless black man chooses to go on exile.The third difference is that the different ethnic groups adopt different approaches to identity assertion.The Chinese daughters in The Joy Luck Club eventually strike a balance between the Chinese and American cultures whereas the black protagonist in Invisible Man wipes out all traces of his existence in the external world and escapes entirely into his internal world to enjoy a temporary peace.The thesis goes further to probe into the causes of the differences,which could be found from two different aspects.One of the causal factors is different historio-cultural influences and the other,gender differences of writers and characters as well in the books.Individuals of different genders tend to view things from different perspectives.For future research in this area,the author of the thesis suggests that more focused studies could later be conducted on cultural causes of existential themes either of blacks or of Chinese Americans alone.The reason is that more focused studies can reach greater depths.