Comparative Study On Cold Mountain And The Odyssey In Myth-Archetypal Approaches

Through the comparison between Cold Mountain and The Odyssey, the thesis studies the parallels and variations in the themes, plots, characters and narrative structures of the two works to find out the archetypes in Cold Mountain and The Odyssey through mythological and archetypal approaches.Northrop Frye said that in appreciating an artistic work, you should stand backwards. That is to say, you should manage the work wholly and cannot limit yourself to one aspect, character, image or narrative model. Then you put this work in the environment diachronically and synchronically and look into the relationships and differences between the characters, images, themes and narration in this work with those of other works. At last you should try to find the similar or different archetypes. After you find the archetypes, you should progressively analyze the ways these archetypes change in the work, and then you can connect the work with its history and cultural environment and study why the author uses this kind of displacement. The archetypal criticism can include aspects such as literature, myths, culture and history, and use its advantages in entirety. Therefore, if the reader wants to understand a literary work well, he must analyze the archetypes in the work against certain cultural background. Only through this, can the reader understand the real meaning of the work. According to Frye, as far as western literary tradition is concerned, two systems contribute to archetypes, that is, the ancient Greek myths and The Bible.This thesis will analyze the archetypes in Cold Mountain through the comparison between Cold Mountain and its model—The Odyssey. There are four parts in the thesis. The fist part is an introduction in which Charles Frazier and his work Cold Mountain, as well as The Odyssey will be briefly introduced. The second part is a survey of the development of mythological and archetypal approaches. Northrop Frye's theory of archetype and the concept of displacement and transposed/ inverted parallelism will be employed in the analysis of the characters. The third part is the main part of the thesis, which includes the analysis of the parallels and variations on themes, plots, characters and narrative structure between Cold Mountain and The Odyssey, especially, the displacements in the depiction of main characters in Cold Mountain. The last part is the conclusion, which summarizes the findings in the archetypal analysis and reveals Frazier's intention of taking The Odyssey as the writing model of Cold Mountain.