From Three Classic Novels To Explore The American Middle-aged Spiritual And Psychological Changes

This dissertation targets at three classical American novels--Ernest Hemingway's Islands In the Sea, Jewish American author Saul Bellow's Herderson the Rain King and the authoress Joyce Carol Oates'Middle Age: A Romance which was published at the beginning of 21st century. Through detailed analysis of the texts, this dissertation explores the portrayals of middle-aged American people who are also members of middle class and goes into their psychological transition by way of plots, character images and mental traits. This dissertation analyzes the mythological archetype of the protagonists and the natural environment using Northrop Frye's theory of archetypal criticism. A diachronic studying is applied to analyze the psychic changes of middle-aged American people who are also members of middle class from World WarⅡto the 21st century with Carl Gustav Jung's psychology analysis, focusing on the issues such as attitudes on family and marriage, society and life. This dissertation points out three different changing processes of those middle-aged people, that is, resistance to compression to self repression during war time; mental aberration to blind search after the war; awakening to self redemption after setbacks in the 21st century. In addition, self redemption could be considered as the generality of people in different periods in spite of the uncorrelated writing time, background or author. However, those protagonists have been exploring their psyche and rescuing themselves, taking respective way featured ideals, reality, difficulty and optimism. Therefore, they have comprehended the significance of one's life by coping with the bewilderment brought by middle age crisis actively and giving courage to readers when they confront with challenges. From this perspective, these three novels keep a close relation with profound realistic meanings.