Conflicts In Existence:Research On Meanings Of Needs In The Corrections

The Corrections, written by American novelist Jonathan Franzen, is a family story which reflects the life of American modern family. In the story, the old couple Enid and Alfred who was diagnosed of Parkinson expect their three children, Gary, Chip and Denise to come home for celebrating Christmas with them. However, their three children with different characters have respective problems in their lives, and they also have quite different values from their parents’. Gary suffers from depression, adoring money and authority and having desire to dominate this family, but in his own family his wife Caroline is the one who is in charge of the family. He has to make a compromise that he goes to celebrate Christmas with his parents alone; Denise is a bisexual, stepping in the other’s family; Chip as a professor is fired by college because of his misconduct and works on internet fraud to defraud American investors. This thesis aims to explore three main protagonists, in terms of their characters, life experience and relations with family with the application of Hierarchy of Needs theory proposed by American psychologist A.H.Maslow. Based on the analysis of Gary’s needs for safety, in Gary’s eyes, losing of money and authority means losing sense of safety; Denise’s needs for belongingness and love, Denise is trying to look for belongingness and love from her different partners, but failed in the end. Enid complains that she does not procure a good husband and she is childless; Chip’s needs for self-actualization, no matter what he does in his life or work,he is a loser. Chip is trying to find himself to achieve self-actualization. The three protagonists’ failures in life and the corrections are presented as enlightenment. Finally,Gary has not changed, living in his own sense of safety; Enid accepts Denise and she finds out her belongingness and love gradually; Chip in particular seems almost miraculously transformed. As analyzed above, human’s needs influence the developmentof people, and understanding these needs sufficiently are useful to improve human’s personalities healthily. Besides, during the process of self-actualization, responsibility plays a great role in one’s life, and increasing responsibility would be helpful to achieve one’s self-actualization.