| Don DeLillo(1936-)is a great novelist in contemporary America.Many of his works have won him important prizes.Literary critic Harold Broom named him as one of the four major American novelists of his time.His novel Libra,published in 1988,has stunned readers with its unique narrative structure and profound reflection on major historical events.In this novel,the identity and subjectivity of the individual who exists in the special cultural atmosphere,social tide,and political environment is one of the issues that the author concerns himself with.Taking Libra as the research text,this thesis is going to explore the identity dilemma and lack of subjectivity faced by individuals living in the complex postmodern environment,resorting to concepts in psychoanalysis,theories of identity and media as well as postmodern social theory,and attempts to provide suggestions on how the individual can deal with self in the special social environment of America by analyzing the causes of the problem.This thesis is divided into four parts.The introductory section involves the introduction to the novel Libra and its writer DeLillo,literature review,and the research significance and framework.Chapter one discusses Oswald's failure of seeking group identity in the light of the historical,political,and social environment at that time.He became an outsider under the circumstances of social discrimination,the exclusion of two ideologies,and the neglect of consumer capitalism.Chapter two mainly takes advantage of the related theories of Lacanian psychoanalysis to expound Oswald's performance of seeking self-identity after he failed to acquire group identity.First of all,various types of mass media provide a large number of ideal images for the individuals who indulged in the media society.The protagonist Oswald confirms his own identity through the imaginary identification with these ideal images.Secondly,when the individual is in the Symbolic Order,the desire of self actually becomes the desire of the Other,and the desire for performing happens to the individual owing to his or her symbolic identification with the Other.Oswald always imagines that he is being gazed,and he obtains his identity by performing under the gaze of the Other to satisfy its desire.Thirdly,the concept of “gaze of the imaginary” emphasizes that the subject is seeing and being seen at the same time.At this moment,the subject is divided into the first-person I and the third-person “I”.“I” becomes the object under the gaze of I,which leads to the loss of individual subjectivity.When Oswald saw the scene of his being shot on TV,Lee Oswald as the first-person self was about to be destroyed while Lee Harvey Oswald as the third-person self would become a commodity,which was consumed by consumers through the continuous broadcast of the media,so as to obtain the so-called identity.During the short period before his death,Oswald also joined the consumers to watch the third-person self entering the history.Chapter three analyzes the factors that influenced Oswald's choice of the extreme in the process of seeking identity from three aspects: individual,society,and text.First of all,Oswald confused the real self and ideal self,and his blind pursuit of the latter led to his paranoid symptoms.Secondly,the collusion between media and ideology led Oswald to deviate from the normal track gradually.At last,DeLillo designs two parallel narrative threads combined with history and invention in Libra and ingeniously utilizes astrology to build a bridge between the two lines so that Oswald can smoothly leap into the network woven by conspiracy and contingency,becoming a patsy.After the analysis,it is concluded that individual should keep balance in the complex postmodern social environment.The personal desire and the construction of identity should not be completely mastered by the social environment,or it is easy for the individual to lose the subjectivity,and finally go to the extreme. |
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