| Theodore Dreiser's An American Tragedy tells the story of an American youth, Clyde's short tragic life. Many scholars have been studying it from the perspective of naturalism, realism or consumerism. However, influenced by the time, ideology, research paradigm, and theoretical resources, the existing study mainly focuses on sociological literary research. This paper, through a literary text reduction An American tragedy, probing into the ideographic structure of the literary imagery, exploring the tragic significance the images contain, and at last making a general summary of these tragic images, arrives at the conclusion that An American Tragedy is not only the embodiment of the capitalist social life of America, but also the model of tragic literature. Text interpretation is essential to literary appreciation, and this paper investigates the novel in view of close reading and imagery criticism to reveal the disillusionment of American society and American Dream. As one of Dreiser's important literary works, An American Tragedy reflects his typical writing style. Dreiser, on the basis of expressing pathos through integrated use of realistic writing skills, metaphors and symbolism, portrays space imagery, nature imagery and color imagery from different aspects, which implies the tragic nature of Clyde's American Dream and his American life.The thesis consists of five parts.The introduction gives a general idea about Theodore Dreiser, reviews the previous studies on his important work An American Tragedy. It also introduces the concept of"imagery", its application and tragic nature in An American Tragedy. At last, it reveals the significance of study from the standpoint of imagery.The first chapter interprets space imagery. This chapter will analyze the tragic space that leads to Clyde's tragedy, such as Asa Griffiths'mission and Samuel Griffiths'mansion, Green-Davidson Hotel, The Griffiths Collar & Shirt Company and Cataraqui County Court.The second chapter deals with nature imagery. Weather images like snow imagery and the turn of four seasons highlight tragic feelings and atmosphere, and symbolize the tragic process of life. The image of bird is the epitome of man's tragic fate, and the wier-weir cry of birds foreshadows Roberta's tragic death. The image of snake, containing sad and dispirited emotions and color, forecasts Clyde's dreams and love ending with tragedy. Images of lakes, flowers and trees witness Clyde and Roberta's tragic love.The last chapter looks into color imagery. This chapter begins by analyzing the symbolic meaning of black and white, brown and blue, and yellow in costumes and accessories, then elaborates color images in depicting objects, natural scenes and characters'mental state.From the above exploration, it could be concluded that images in An American Tragedy illustrated from different perspectives are applied to reveal that Clyde's tragedy is a life tragedy of broken American Dream, and thus an American social tragedy. |
