| There exist numerous researches on the novels of Victor Hugo. Former studies mainly concentrate on characters, narration, humanitarianism, literary and aesthetic thoughts reflected in his novels. This thesis intends to focus on the depiction of death in Hugo’s novels and probe further into death consciousness of various characters, with the direction of his philosophy of death. In Hugo’s novels, death comes into sight from time to time, and death consciousness has been increasingly growing up with the development of his life experience and thoughts.The first part of this thesis is introduction, including research condition of Hugo’s novels, death writing tradition in western literature, research significance and methods. The body part is divided into four chapters. Chapter one analyzes the depiction of characters’suicide for the reason of love and politics in Hugo’s novels, then further explores those characters’transcendence of death and Hugo’s pursuit of lofty beauty. Chapter two concentrates on homicide for the reason of religion, society and nature in Hugo’s novels, and explores the victim’s fear of death and Hugo’s searching for life existence. Chapter four makes an introduction of natural death in Hugo’s novels, and then from the perspective of those characters’kindness and sagaciousness analyzes their life cognition of facing death directly, for the purpose of proving Hugo’s calling for redemption of holy love. Chapter four makes an analysis of the reasons for Hugo’s deep love of death delineation from the perspective of western literary tradition, Hugo’s experience of death and his philosophical and political thoughts. The death writing tradition in western literary field makes him firmly believe the immortality of soul and concentrate on the death writing while keeping up the trend of the times. The death of his relativ es and friends and fellowmen makes him have a thorough meditation of the meaning of being dead a nd being alive. The political idea of building a republic system and the humanitarian idea of using go odness to overcome evilness makes him accustomed to depicting the scene in which the evil die a tra gic death and the good die a natural death.Through the analysis in this thesis, it is found out that death consciousness reflected in each character of Hugo’s novels is quite confused and complicated. Although Hugo’s cognition of life to some extent clashes with that of those characters in his novels, most of the time they are the same. Hugo always conforms to his religious and philosophical thoughts in his writing. He has firm belief in God’s eternity and immortality of soul, thus those characters with kindness can eventually lead themselves to the way of eternity. What’s more, his elder daughter’s unfortunate death enables him to have better understanding of death. He has made a transformation from merely objecting to guillotine and death penalty to reflecting on the essence of life and the meaning of dasein. Hugo’s best contribution to France in the 19th century is implying his humanitarian thoughts such as benevolence and universal love into politics and literature, which has far-reaching influence both at that time and in later ages. |
