Grotesqueness And Quest For Salvation

There are many comparable aspects between Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio and the Luzhen stories collected in Lu Xun’s Call to Arms and Wandering. To name a few, both of them are written in the early20th century; both stories are put in the setting of a small town; both protagonists are small potatoes, both are considered as representatives of "morbid" literature, etc. However, only a few studies have been done on comparing these two authors, taking the first steps of discussing the similarities and differences in their themes and writing crafts. Obviously, the existing researches are not sufficient in digging the comparability of the two authors. This dissertation is going to further the comparative study on the two towns’ stories and to discuss the deeper similarities between them.Both the authors portray small potatoes in small towns while bearing in mind a broad view of human beings’general condition. The grotesqueness in the characters is a kind of concentrated demonstration of the darkness in human nature and men’s predicament. A quest for salvation can be discerned in the portrait of grotesqueness, and the works have presented some methods of self-salvation such as Anderson’s "run-away" and Lu Xun’s "hope in children”. However, the two authors give the self-salvation methods negative endings, which show their lack of confidence in them. As to the quest for salvation, both the two authors have conveyed their understanding toward the salvation message in Christianity through their works. They parody the story of Christ’s crucifixion, but mention nothing of His resurrection. From their adaptation we can perceive their disbelief of God’s salvation method, which explains why darkness is throughout their stories.This dissertation reexamines the grotesqueness in the two towns’stories from the perspective of discussing the message of human predicament and quest for salvation. This macro point of view effectively combines the two counterparts and successfully demonstrates their positive value of "shocking people’s souls" and "arousing the attention to cure and save". This thesis involves not only the method of paralleled comparative study, but also that of interdisciplinary study—using the resources of Christianity to analyze the salvation problem in the works. It proposes in the end that the determining cause for the darkness of their works is the authors’desertion of God’s salvation.