Seeking Homeland

"Literature is a study of man" which shows that literature is a discipline of writing "man", so we can analyze literature through the angle of man. However, modern people have already been in a homeless state. Therefore, seeking homeland has been already imperative. Rabbit Tetralogy is just writing the process of the rabbit's seeking homeland. This paper views humanistic theory as its theoretical basis, and sets about analyzing Harry's homeless state and the process of seeking homeland in the Rabbit Tetralogy from the perspective of homeland consciousness. Ernst Cassirer thought "people are symbolic animals," and this definition reveals that human nature and desire are concrete symbols. In these novels, the rabbit strived for homeland to return to and realized his homeland consciousness through the symbols such as money, sex, imagination and religion. The material desire of the rabbit's was fulfilled through the possession of money, but it failed to promote the establishment of its homeland. On the contrary, the rabbit's spiritual world was hollower and more anxious. In the process of searching for love, the rabbit lapsed into the ceaseless pursuit of sex because he didn't know what kind of love that he needed. This misguided love which needed proving his existence through sex can't help the rabbit build up homeland. Then the rabbit was addicted to fantasies, and tried to search for homeland in his imagination. But his fantasies were broken by the ruthlessness of reality. At this time, the rabbit chose to attach himself to religion. But "God was died", how can God help the rabbit search for the spiritual homeland? In such fruitless circumstances the rabbit was not desperate. He chose to turn his sight to death, instead, and tried to build new homeland in the dead world; thereby, the rabbit got immortal soul and the absolute freedom of spirit. In this sense, the rabbit transcended the traditional sense of death and endowed death with new life connotation. The rabbit began to search for homeland because of the broken spiritual homeland, while the reasons of the broken spiritual homeland were the results of double extrusion between his limited cognition of homeland consciousness and American incomplete social culture of the day. Along with deep analyses, this paper both reveals the break and decline of American spirit and culture and provides certain life revelation for individual posterity.