A Study Of The Theme Of Escape In Thomas Wolfe’s Long Story

Thomas Wolfe was one of the major American Southern writers of the late 1920 s,and as a creator who was extraordinarily sensitive to both existential space and inner experience,his fiction was points to the confusion of personal existence itself.Wolfe’s characters grows and explores through friction,misunderstanding,conflict,and the absence of love.They explore how to escape from the existential dilemmas they find themselves in,how to reconcile positively with themselves,and how to reconcile with the world.Throughout the novel,we can clearly see the escape behavior of the characters when they are faced with difficulties.But escape for Wolfe and Wolfe’s characters is never a momentary escape,but always an active search for a way out of escape.In the process of escape,failure and even death are inevitable,but the value of escape is that after failure,one does not give up the persistent pursuit of the future.Through a careful reading of four of Wolfe’s novels," Look Homeword,Angel" "of Time and the River" "The Web and the Rock" "You can’t Go Home Again" I have sorted out the textual presentation of the theme of "escape" in the novels and tried to ummarise the characteristics and values of escape in Wolfe’s writing,taking into account the writer’s own life and the life trajectories of the characters in the books.When the subjects of escape are confronted with their own spiritual crisis caused by interpersonal imbalances such as family relations and gender relations,indifference and alienation between social classes and mutual hatred between different races,they often choose to escape to different real spaces,to spiritual spaces and to seek the solace of love.But escaping is not simply running away from the predicament in which one is currently living.The purpose of escape is still to pursue,escape is to find a way out for individual life and even human survival.Although the process of escape highlights too much confusion and pain,the characters in the novel always use their own different ways of escape to fight against the painful situation they suffer.In the novel,Eugene finds the end of his escape in the world of art,while George lands in the process of escaping from love and pursuing it.Both Eugene and George have experienced the loss of family love,the confusion of love between the sexes,the indifference between people,and the hatred between races in their formative years,and it is these experiences that make the two protagonists and Wolfe himself deeply realize that the love between men and women is not enough.The answer to escape is the transformation from small love to great love.Love can eliminate the indifference and divide between people,and can stop people from running away.The characters’ escape from the cobwebs of life in the novel is a persistent search for a better world full of love after suffering from the lack of love.In the novel,Wolfe’s writing about escape also reflects his persistent exploration of building harmonious interpersonal relations,getting out of spiritual difficulties and seeking belonging,and also shows the deepest humanistic concern and historical responsibility of Wolfe as a writer.