Second Skin: From Perspectives Of Postmodernism And Feminism

With his outstanding originality in the artistic skills and creative thoughts, John Hawkes has established his statue in the history of the post-World War II American literature as one of the most distinguished experimental novelist. Though his works are often criticized as unnecessarily obscure, it should be noted that John Hawkes is a passionate artist devoting himself into experimental creativity. He intends to create a new world instead of representing one. He challenges the established representation of realism and aggressively pursues the nightmarish, the comic, the disruptive and the irrational. With his delightful violation of a reader's conventional trust, Hawkes creates his own trademark of his fictions throughout his career---the paradoxical mixture of comedy and terror. His keenly-felt nightmarish consciousness, comic treatment of violence and the subtle artistic techniques make him independent in the postmodernist writing. It is his unique originality that enriches the nightmarish overtones of the novels and gives them their poetic quality. In this sense, John Hawkes makes himself a leading figure in the postwar American novelists.Second Skin, a masterpiece of postmodernist writing, is the fiction which materializes his creative concepts and his subtle artistic skills. The novel is the protagonist---Skipper's flesh-out psychical journey of the imaginative reconstruction of his past. Using his lyrical language and humor to triumph over death and evil, Skipper not only survives in the imposition of chaos but also creates a new life with the power inside---imagination and dignity. In this novel, the reader could see clearly Hawkes'refusal to recognize, or abide the rational consciousness in his fondness for delicately withholding narrative information and in his habit of shuffling ordered events in time. Structure in this novel is based upon the cross-references, parallels and contrasts rather than the development of plot and character, the irrelative fragments of recollection replace the plots, the psychological narration in the trace of hummingbird substitutes for the detailed depiction of the characters, and the multiple themes are deeply embedded in the seeming unconcerned narration.It should be stressed that with Second Skin, Hawkes shifts from the darkly Gothic to a more comic and absurd treatment of the world by endowing Skipper with the clownish spirit to confront the absurdity of the world. Hawkes challenges the reader to wade into the black waters of the violent, the comic, and the repressive in Skipper's world, to sift through painful and regretful elements embedded in the past, to confront death and to create hope for the future. In addition, the author shows his great sympathy for the women and craftily leaks the feminine voices from the totalizing imagination of the first-person male narrator, exposing how the males portray women as objects of their desires and impose the silence on the women.Trying to get a panorama idea of the artistic presentation from viewpoints of postmodernism and feminism, this thesis tends to advance the discussion in four chapters besides Introduction"and"Conclusion". Chapter One,"The Nightmarish World", introduces the social thought background of the novel, analyzes the features of the characters in postmodernist novels, and points out the theme that the war causes the absurd society as well as the corrupt humanity. Chapter Two,"The Comic Tragedy", from the viewpoint of Black Humor, analyzes John Hawkes'artistic way by daringly mixing horror with humor and the grotesque with the heroic. Representing all the features of anti-hero in Black Humor, the protagonist actively chooses his role as a comic clown and a fighting hero to create his own way for counteracting and redeeming the evil and despair with smiling bitterness. The joyful new life on the Wandering Island further confirms Skipper's strength and grace in transcending death and cruelty. Chapter Three,"The Postmodernist Techniques", analyzes the author's distinguished and artistic treatments in the novel: his extreme shuffle of time and space, his exploration of all the possibilities of first-person narration, the phantasmagoric symbolic codes, the parody of the traditional mythology, and the technique of metafiction. Chapter Four,"The Second Sex", turns to cope with the relationship between Skipper and three major female characters. From the viewpoint of feminist, it points out how the male narrator"fathers"his text to claim his triumph of creating a patriarchy world as well as constructing a silent world for all the women, and illuminates the real world of the fighting women through the struggle of these three female characters. Finally, the"Conclusion"briefly summarizes the artistic values of Second Skin and gives the further explanation for the seeming obscurity of the novel. In a word, interested in pursuing the nightmare, in assaulting the conventional world, and in creating his unique aesthetic techniques, Hawkes lays himself out in Second Skin to testify his outstanding artistic innovation and makes this novel an extraordinary acquisition to the literary world.