Polyphonic Life Under Carnival Masks

Thomas Pynchon, as one of the most acclaimed American postmodernists in the 20th century, is gifted to weave wildly eccentric characters, frenzied action, frequent digressions, and imposing lengths together in his literary works, which encompass a vast array of subject matter, styles and themes. His life experience and educational background has equipped him as a mathematician of prose, who is fond of and also good at blurring the conventional boundary between "High" and "low" culture, which is always interpreted as one of the defining characteristics of Bakhtinian theory.Bakhtinian thought took its shape on the basis of his careful study on the medieval ritual celebration known as carnival, which embodies a kind of folk wisdom that celebrates the body and opposes all forms of authority. Thus, Pynchon's fiction, which release the real human nature and fight for the discourse freedom, undoubtedly cater to Bakhtin's requirement for literature, that is, the true novel is carnivalized.Known primarily for his sprawling and labyrinthine novels such as V. and Gravity's Rainbow, Pynchon has also published some short stories early in his career, and collected them in Slow Learner:Early Stories, which explores such issues as fragmentation and alienation in a high-tech, information-saturated society and the human effort to find order in a universe seemingly governed by chaos. Although those stories have been developed enough as short pieces to stand on their own, and presented a panoramic picture of Pynchon's literary world, they have failed to draw enough attention from critics to commence carefully study, especially from Bakhtin's perspective.Therefore, this thesis makes the endeavor to conduct a detailed analysis of the five stories in Slow Learner:Early Stories in terms of Bakhtinian theory. Searching for the bonding points between carnival and Slow Learner:Early Stories, this thesis will first give a general review of the carnival spirits reflected in Pynchon's life, demonstrating the Bakhtinian light cast on Pynchon's fictional world. More elaborations are devoted to the exploration of the carnival themes permeated in three of the stories, namely Low-Lands, The Small Rain, and Entropy, with the discussion of the carnival hell, the carnival death scene and the carnival ritual. As an essential sub-branch of Bakhtinian theory, polyphony becomes the media between carnival concept and literary creation, providing a favorable environment for writer and characters to launch dialogues freely and simultaneously. By illustrating different voices in The Secret Integration and free dialogues in Under the Rose, the thesis presents Pynchon's intention of creating multidimensional characters in a polyphonic world, as well as his profound understanding of "being-outside-of-oneself" in fiction writing.This thesis comes to the conclusion that the artistic quality of Pynchon's Slow Learner:Early Stories can be sublimated through the interpretation of Bakhtinian theory, which mostly originates from the fork culture. This thesis also presents the essence of Bakhtin's concept of fork culture as a culture of laughter, which is a profoundly universal laughter, a laughter that contains a whole outlook on the world.