A Study Of The Initiation Theme Of Missing Mom

Joyce Carol Oates, known as one of the most remarkable female writers in contemporary America, is a prolific writer with a great many novels, short stories, poems and plays. Her works are of substantial hybrid, covering rebellion of the youth, tension of the city, rational reflection, and document the panorama of contemporary America with distinctive perspectives and a deep insight. Nikki, the protagonist of Missing Mom, follows her mother’s tracks and undergoes a remarkable transformation during a tumultuous year, who comes out of bereavements, gets rid of indecent love affairs, returns to family bond and begins a new life.Initiation is an everlasting literary theme. As a novel of initiation, the principal subject of Bildungsroman is the moral, psychological, and intellectual development of a mainly young character. Missing Mom is a typical initiation novel. However, the study of initiation novels in China initiated relatively late, yet developing fast. Rarely do scholars contribute to the initiation theme of Oates’s novels so far. Based on the theory of initiation story this thesis focuses on four basic elements in one single initiation story, which are the protagonist, the guide, the companion and the epiphany in the growth journey, and probes its unique artistic features. Therefore a new point of view can be adopted to a better understanding of Joyce Carol Oates and her novels.By detailed and comprehensive analysis of Missing Mom, the view of this thesis can be expressed as follows. Oates aims at exhibiting the concept of literary creation hidden in her stories, that is, with the description of young people’s misfortune, she tries to attract more and more people to care about the social problems that are related to, and hence arouse young people’s self-consciousness to overcome difficulties and strive for a happy life.