Alienation And Dilemma:Themes In Alice Munro's Dear Life

Alice Munro,as the 13^th female recipient of the Noble Prize in literature,is famed for her short stories.She is also acclaimed as the“master of the contemporary short story”.Her works focus on people's ordinary life with extraordinary narrative skill.By depicting conflicts and predicaments that individuals confront in daily life,Munro unveils her view of life.Composed of fourteen short stories,Dear Life is the finale in her career claimed by Munro,which is interweaved with death and life,ups and downs,happiness and sorrow.Her stories are seldom organized by integrated plots,while readers will harvest unexpected and pleasant experience.This thesis intends to study various forms of alienation and dilemmas in Dear Life with the help of Lefebvre's critical theory of everyday life,trying to explore a path to dear life.Dear Life is Munro's reflection to estranged everyday life.She admits that alienation is the destiny of mundane life,but there is a promising road to alleviate agony by eradicating stereotype,harboring life and loving life,which conforms with the idea of Lefebvre's theory.Lefebvre is an eminent Marxist theoretician in France.His everyday life criticism provides new ideas for Marxist theory.Meanwhile,alienation theory is the foundation of this critique.He believes that in the seemingly ordinary life,there are full of traces of alienation in every corner together with various survival dilemmas.In the short stories of Dear Life,Munro presents the characters'choices when they become enmeshed in dilemmas.Some of them prefer to estrange themselves from this world,and others confront troubles.They also bear the different consequences of their choices.Munro holds that escaping from this situation is not the optimal way.As Lefebvre's humanistic ideas present,Munro motivates people to discover the wonders of daily life and to make everyday life to be art for casting off the estranged life and finding a path of lovable life.This thesis is comprised of the following five parts:The first part is an introduction about Alice Munro with her gorgeous works,also including a sketch of the alienation theory and an informative literature review.The second part discusses three forms of alienation in Dear Life,including personal alienation,alienation between men and women,parents and children.By evaluating these relations,it can be seen that doomed alienation occupies in Munro's work.The existence of alienation accompanies varied survival predicaments,and therefore in the third part,this thesis delves into survival predicaments,primarily in psychology,from the three aspects of ethics,freedom and responsibility.Next the fourth part endeavors to find ways to solve alienation and dilemmas.The moments of epiphany in the stories,family gatherings and other forms provide effective ways to eliminate the issues.The last part is a conclusion,by analyzing a variety of forms of alienation and the survival dilemmas faced by people in daily life,Dear Life manifests Munro's attention to social issues and her philosophy of life.Everyday life is a contradictory world that is interweaved with life and hope,alienation and dilemma.The flowers of life keep blooming and withering.Only regarding life courses as art with careful elaboration can it possess a complete meaning.