Behind The Behavior And Fate

Alice Munro who has gained a fame of "our Chekhov" is one of the world's greatest contemporary short story writers.She has won three Governor General's Literary Awards and two Giller Prizes.Her works are strongly condensed and featured by ordinary people from small places,especially town girls,as heroes and heroines,which aims to dig out the tragic elements hidden in ordinary life.Since the publication of Munro's short story collection Runaway,the master piece has received so much attention that it won her the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2013.Runaway consists of eight short stories.Three of them are successive ones that share the same heroine.Thus,it tells about either the love experience or the kinship crisis of altogether six ordinary town girls.All the six heroines share one thing in common.That is,their behavior is all affected by some power originating from their own hearts or from others'.The power has nothing to do with personal experience and cannot be controlled by individuals.Some of the heroines can get along well with the power and acquire happy endings while others are reduced to victims of the power.Thus,this paper aims to find out what the power is that affects those heroines' behavior and fate.Carl Jung is one of the greatest psychologists in 20th century.He is the founder of the analytical psychology which is supported by his collective unconscious theory and the archetype theory.The content of the collective unconscious is the archetype which is able to affect and even control people's behavior and fate unconsciously.Among all the archetypes,there are four significant ones named anima,animus,shadow,and persona.Thus,due to the consistency between Jungian archetype theory and the research purpose described above,the archetype theory will be applied in this thesis as the theoretical foundation.This thesis mainly applies the methods of archetypal criticism,literature review,comparison and textual analysis.It first analyzes the behavior and endings of Carla and Juliet while dealing with love and digs out the animus and anima reasons that affect their behavior and result in their love endings.The love tragedy of Carla and the happy love ending of Juliet forms great contrast,which obviously shows that the way of dealing with anima and animus is decisive to people's fate.Besides,this thesis probes into the love choice of Grace,the kinship crisis of Lauren,the mistake of Robin and the destroyed life of Tessa,and finds out the two archetypes that affect or even control their life,which are called shadow and persona.Based on all the analysis of the six heroines' behavior while dealing with love or kinship,it can be seen that the four archetypes of animus,animus,shadow and persona can hardly be transferred into conscious and sensed by people.And they can make people either become crazy or depressed.Or they can make people lost in inner conflicts.As a result,they keep affecting or even manipulating people's behavior.However,this thesis lists the psychological manifestations under the effects of different archetypes on the basis of analyzing the heroines' corresponding psychological feelings and their behavior led by these feelings.In this way,readers can tell which archetype is affecting them based on their own psychological features and their behavior so as to deal with the effects properly and finally get rid of them.Thus,this thesis has great realistic significance.From the present research achievements both at home and abroad on Runaway,we can see that researches based on psychological views are not yet deep and abundant.Besides,most of the researches focus only on the first story in the whole short story collection.Therefore,this thesis will give a deep internal analysis of the behavior and fate of all the six heroines in the whole collection in order to find out the essential reasons that affect people's behavior and their fate,which definitely broadens the psychological research view.