Lost And Found In Freedom:A Carnivalesque Study On Jonathan Franzen's Freedom

Jonathan Franzen,entitled by the Times as “Great American Novelist” in 2010,has created national bestsellers including The Corrections(National Book Award winner in 2001)and Freedom(2010),which focus on middle-class family life in the contemporary American society and have been regarded as a turning point of post-modernism changing into a new kind of realism.Through depicting a Midwestern family the Berglunds from the 1960 s to the 21 st century,Freedom has created a carnivalized world where people use and abuse freedom and meanwhile transgressing their lines,reflecting the writer's concern about the abuse of freedom among individuals and also the political and economic institutions,especially in the environmental movements and the Iraq War.This thesis is intended to apply Bakhtin's carnivalesque theory to analyze how the polyphonic narration creates a free and equal platform for the characters to tell their complex and sometimes even self-contradictory inner world and how humor,the core element of carnival,functions as a tool to deconstruct the grand narratives,like environmentalism and the concept of freedom.It will be discussed from three aspects: the polyphonic narrating style,the carnivalistic characterization in which the ambivalence and transgression of characters will be analyzed and the carnivalesque treatment of grand narratives.Firstly,the multiple points-of-view in this novel has produced a polyphonic and carnivalistic atmosphere where the characters narrate their own experience freely and frankly with unique stylistic and linguistic features,forming a dialogic world in which the narrations supplement or contradict with each other.Secondly,the inner world shown by each character is rather complicated and even self-contradictory,humorously showing the constant inner struggles of the characters in front of their transgressions.During the transgression,they face conflicts of different ideologies and come to some sort of reconciliation and reestablishment of their once-broken relationships.Thirdly,the transgression of the characters,like abusing personal freedom in marital relationships and disturbing official activities,is replete with humor showing the comic incongruity between environmentalism and economic growth,the excessive worship of freedom and the neglect of responsibilities,thus successfully decrowning the grand narratives promoted by the government.It ironically criticizes the abuse of freedom and the abnormal drive of capitalism,for Freedom has been used as a grand call to start the Iraq war and environmentalism as a justifiable excuse to promote the mining industry for further profits.After the transgressions in the carnival,the characters have to some extents reestablished their inner order and also their relationships with others.However,the social problems,though having been uncovered and satirized,remain unsolved.The open ending of the novel indicates that in the wake of the carnival,although regeneration has been initiated,transformations are not around the corner.