A Study Of The Hours In The Light Of Albert Camus's "Absurdity" And "Rebellion" Philosophy

Michael Cunningham(1952-)is an important contemporary American writer,whose works not only focus on minority groups and various social problems,but also explore modern man's common existential predicaments.The Hours(1998)is a highly successful experimental novel of his.It was celebrated as the best novel of1998 by New York Times and other newspapers,and won the 1999 Pulitzer Prize and the PEN/Faulkner Award.The Hours is an original literary creation based on Virginia Woolf's Mrs.Dalloway(1925)as well as the life and biographies of Woolf,and continues with the essence of her works and her innovative writing style.The Hours uses Mrs.Dalloway as a cord to connect the one-day life of three women in different time and space,describing an epoch of confusion and chaos where man has to confront various existential predicaments.Each character's complete story line is divided into several disconnected chapters,with other characters' stories inserted in between.Their stories span over the whole twentieth century,with their fates intertwined with each other.Through delicate arrangement of a fragmented narrative,Cunningham successfully constructs a fragmented era and predicaments of modern man caused by such fragmentation.French intellectual Albert Camus,a contemporary of Virginia Woolf's,was also keenly aware of the historical turn and changes of the epoch,and explained in detail his responses to the same meaningless and godless world in his novels and philosophical essays.This thesis adopts Camus' s philosophical contemplation,and analyzes Cunningham's The Hours with Camus' s philosophy of “absurdity” and“rebellion”.The introduction first offers a brief review of Cunningham's literary achievements,and summarizes related researches on The Hours,laying the foundation for this thesis.Then Camus' s philosophical contemplation in The Myth of Sisyphus and The Rebel is adopted as the theoretical framework of this thesis,and relevant concepts of absurdity and rebellion are discussed.After the introduction,along withCamus' s interpretations of the concept of absurdity,the novel's major characters' existential predicaments and their absurd situation are reconstructed and analyzed,which prepares for their different existential choices in the following part;the second part analyzes their existential choices,including suicide,suicidal attempts,and resumption of life,figuring out the meaning of man's existence in a miserable and fragmented era that lacks any profound faith.In a broader perspective,their different existential choices jointly constitute a complete history of rebellion: in a meaningless world,individuals' struggle against the imposition of an arbitrary fate produces human dignity and meaning.This thesis finally concludes: the awareness of absurdity endows individuals with access to independence and liberty from their epoch and keeps them at a certain distance from history in their participation of history,which enables them to transcend time's limitation and achieve personal meaning;individuals' actions to pursue meaning in a turbulent epoch and courage to oppose a prescribed life make their existential choices respectable.