Theory Of Alienation Theme Of "no Pointer Clock"

Carson McCullers is one of the representative writers of American Southern Literature in the twentieth century. Her delicate brush strokes outlined the southerners lonely inner world and the spirit of the isolated survival state. She was also a recorder and observer of the process of modernization in the southern United States. She demonstrated the South community which is in changing times and the wave of capitalist industrialization in front of the reader. Clock Without Hands is McCullers’s last novel, and it cost the writer twenty years from brewing to the creation. As the last novel, the novel did not concern such as previous work. Researchers focused on the consistent theme-the exploration of loneliness and spiritual isolation in her novel, but mostly ignored the social and historical significance, especially the modernist factors in the works. The Southern United States was striding toward the capitalism modernization in the fifties and sixties of the twentieth century, when the pain caused by the Civil War did not heal. But by the invasion of the north a large number of capital has been pushing the modernization of South. The writer was living in such an era background that her works inevitably infected breath of modernism, of which alienation is one of the most obvious feature. Therefore my article will focus on the alienation theme of Clock Without Hands. Combining with the social reality of the South, I will show the alienation state of the body and mind feel in the process of rapid development of capitalist society to provide a new perspective for this work.The preamble is a brief introduction to the writer McCullers and the prior studies of her works. Then I combed the concept of alienation, and preliminary investigated the significance of the application of alienation theory to analyse Clock Without Hands. In the later two parts I probed the manifestations of alienation in the work carefully.social forces of power and money make alienation, the alienation of human relations and the self-alienation of the people. I discussed the writer’s comprehension and expression of alienation. The final section explored McCullers works for reflection and exploration of the anti-alienation. After the alien force of the external social and interpersonal and self-alienation, people can only turn to their hearts to look for a breakthrough from the self-reflection.