Analysis Of The Egg: A Marked-Theme Perspective

Sherwood Anderson is a controversial figure in the history of literature. But on the whole, critics give Anderson and his works more positive than the negative criticism. He is even acknowledged as the father of American short stories and even the writer's writer. Sherwood Anderson is known for his novels and short stories that portray the life of small figures in small towns in Midwestern America. As an excellent storyteller,Anderson seems to be preoccupied by a need to describe the plight of "grotesques": the unsuccessful, the deprived and the inarticulate in the transitional period of America."the father"in the story The Egg is a good case in point.The Egg,regarded as one of his best short stories in his lifetime, taken from the collection of his short stories named "The Triumph of the Egg"(1921), Sherwood Anderson's second collection of short stories, has always drawn the attention of the critics of him ever since it was published. But the criticism on The Egg mainly revolves around the core character"the father"from the different literary perspective like the study on the theme"grotesqueness", the cultural background of The Egg to which"the father"belongs, and the techniques that Anderson uses in his character portrait. And it has been acknowledged that the exploration of the essence and the soul of the character"the father"has got the high praise of his critics and also becomes one of his characteristics in Anderson's character creation. The thesis in chapter 3 has a general review of the major three skills Anderson uses in his characterization from a literary perspective.But with the wider application of Theme-Rheme Theory and Given-New Information Theory in the analysis of written discourse, the present thesis plans to view Anderson's character portrait from a new perspective: marked Theme perspective. The thesis aims to find out how marked Theme helps Sherwood Anderson portray"the father"in the fiction and helps express the inner sides of"the father". Moreover, the marked Theme analysis in The Egg also plans to discover a new perspective other than the traditional literary perspective to appreciate fictions and deepen our understanding of fiction characters. Through this investigation, the thesis hopes to prove that marked Theme perspective is a good approach to study literary discourse and understand better the characters in the fiction. As a case study of marked Themes in the fiction The Egg, basically the thesis will first collect all the marked Themes from The Egg. And then all the marked Themes are classified for a careful analysis within the theoretic framework of Theme-Rheme Theory and Given-New Information Theory in chapter 4. Through the analysis, the thesis finally reaches a conclusion that the highest proportion of circumstantial adjuncts including different kinds of adverbials or prepositions, etc. as marked ideational Themes play a quite significant role not only in the realization of information rearrangement to achieve the coherence of the whole discourse but also in the exploration of character's inner feelings and character portrait. The flexible but particular choice of marked Theme helps Anderson to change the normal information arrangement to highlight some information, to contrast some information, to foreshadow some information and more often than not to set a particular context for some information development. What's more, the re-arrangement of information can sometimes result in the magic rhetorical effects like parallelism and symmetry. Hence the mixture of inner feelings, hopes, conflicts of"the father"and his odd behaviors and his words are vividly displayed between the lines and the grotesque image of the father is deeply rooted in reader's memory. Therefore, the thesis hopes to give suggestions to appreciate fictions in a linguistic way.