A Study Of Narrative Therapy In Sherwood Anderson’s Short Stories

Sherwood Anderson’s creation in short fictions is of importance in American literary history. Reputed as the "writer’s writer", he concentrates on various lives in the industrial society and reflects the conflict between social reality and personal expectation of self, on the basis of which the theme of "grotesque".runs through. This thesis is aimed to explore Anderson’s "grotesques" in his short fictions by analyzing issues like the externalization of internalized problems, reconstructive cognition of self, and the therapeutic end of these characters through narratives of self or the others’ life stories. Thereby three collections, Winesburg, Ohio, The Triumph of the Egg, and Death in the Woods and Other Stories, are taken as objects of the study from the perspective of narrative therapy. Nine personas in the three collections are divided into three groups, namely adolescents, women, and men, and then each character’s narrative is analyzed from the cognitive perspective.Though with diverse life backgrounds, these "grotesques" all suffer from the marginalization to some extent. It is the result of the power/discourse mechanism among which ideological components like truth and knowledge make an individual an objectified subject without the real subjectivity. The deprivation of subjectivity represented as anxiety, pain, or loss of selfhood posits them to an aphasic state generally. Besides, Anderson’s life experiences provide a basis for the aphasia. Nonetheless, narration, a unique capability of human, remains in the impulse of "grotesques" to express and then makes their phonation possible. At the cognitive level, the narrator’s metaphorical thoughts, schemas as well as emotions accelerate the retrieval and reorganization of episodes, and reconstruct narrative modes which are the turning point to the therapy. Changes in narratives of three groups imply Anderson’s varied personalities paralleling with his chronological creation, that is, Anderson’s practice of self salvation and the participation in the therapy as a listener to these stories. In the processing of metaphors and schemas in texts, actual readers as well as listeners can sympathetically step into the storyworld to experience narrative therapy which extends the significance of Andersonian "grotesques".