| John Banville(1945-)is known as "one of the best Irish writers in 20 th Century and 21 st Century",and the critics have even compared him to Joyce and Beckett many times.Like his two great predecessors,Banville's novels favor a heavy theme,presenting the tragedy of life and the nihility of existence,interpreting death,loss and trauma,and being absorbed in the psychological world and inner experience of human beings.These deep themes make Banville unique in the present post-modern aesthetic trend of sensuous supremacy.This thesis intends to take Banville's four most representative works,namely The Sea,The Book of Evidence,The Untouchable and The Infinities,as examples,using the method of text reading and theme interpretation,to show how this novelist who has deep insight and critical thinking continue to explore the depth of existence and the meaning of life,in an era of hostility to deepness.The thesis chooses three basic themes recurring in his novels: death,nihility and memory,trying to present the life picture and the background of the world molded in his works.The thesis is divided into five parts.The first part is the introduction which introduces the background of subject selection of this thesis,the basic research situation of Banville at home and abroad,and the research methods,directions and train of thought of the thesis.The second part discusses the writing of death in Banville's works.In his works,the protagonists were born for death,and their lives were full of heavy tragedy.On one hand,death has a fundamental negative effect on human existence.On the other hand,for the protagonists in Banville's works,death is also an extreme way of self-salvation for the survival pain.Therefore,Banville's consciousness of death is full of paradoxes that there are two kinds of properties(negation and redemption)at the same time.In general,Banville's works are full of confusion between the heaviness of death and the pain of life.The third part discusses the protagonists' strong sense of nihility on meaning of life caused by death in Banville's works.In Banville's view,the world is absurd.Its absurdity lies first in the strong power of the natural world,represented by the sea,which engulfs everything(including human life)ruthlessly,and then in the disengaged and alienated human relations in human society.Therefore,the lives of the protagonists in Banville's works are extremely painful,and they are lost in the void of the perpetual self meaning which is manipulated by desire.And this is one of the main ideas of existentialism.The fourth part discusses the writing of memory in Banville's works.In the view of Banville,human life is meaningless,but one can use memory to resist nihility.Because memory can reinterpret one's past experience and gives meaning to the experience,and it's also the most effective tool for people to look forward to the future and let life continue.The fifth part is the conclusion.Three basic themes in Banville's creations-death,nihility and memory-are combing and explaining in detail in the thesis.The purpose is to understand the thought tendency and creative features of this writer who has had a major impact on the contemporary English writing,and to help Chinese readers to better appreciate and understand the writer's aesthetic value and cultural significance.The fascination with deepness,seriousness and tragic themes of Banville's novels shows that writers who are serious about their life experience and aesthetic choices can still win the understanding and respect without having to indulge in the interest of transparency,games,zero aesthetics and instant cheering.In this sense,John Banville's novel writing is a demonstration that there is abundant and broad space between the pursuit of quality and the influence efficiency of literature.John Banville's writing is to infiltrate into the depths of human consciousness,into the secrets of human life and into the bottom of individual survival to achieve understanding of others. |
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