A Study Of Tragedies In All The King’s Men From The Perspective Of Myth-archetypal Criticism

All the King’s Men is a classic work by Robert Penn Warren(1905-1989).It’s a long novel full of allusions and tragic themes.However,because of its close relationship with the life of historical character Huey Pierce Long(1893-1935),the radical populist governor of Louisiana in the United States of the 1920 s and 1930 s,a lot of researches have been done from the perspective of politics.But,as the research goes deeper,the rich connotation of this novel has been recognized and more and more scholars are aware of the universal themes.Because of its abundance of tragedies and archetypes,this thesis aims to explore the tragedies in this novel within the framework of myth-archetypal theories.In this thesis,the author tries to detect the relationships between this literary work and myth.The author attempts to analyze the tragedies from the perspective of myth-archetypal criticism with the method of placing the analysis under the scope of mythology in order to dig up more universal meaning of this literary work.Biblical and Greek mythologies are the basis of the archetypal analysis.The creativity of the research is that the tragedies,the causes and dissolutions of tragedies of the novel are all studied under the core theory “archetype” of myth-archetypal criticism.This thesis consists of three parts: introduction,the main part and conclusion.In introduction,there are literary review,research questions,introduction of theoretical framework and the structure of the thesis.The main part of this thesis is divided into three chapters.In the first chapter,the aim is to figure out the archetypes of tragedies in All the King’s Men.Three archetypes of tragedies are discussed.They are “Adam’s fall”,“Christ’s death” and “Oedipus’ s fate”,which correspond respectively to the fall of Cass Mastern,Judge Irwin and Willie Stark,the death of Willie Stark and Adam Stanton,and the tragic fate of Jack Burden in the novel.In the second chapter,the causes of these tragedies are analyzed with the help of Myth-archetypes.Three archetypes of causes of the tragedies are detected.In the third chapter,the dissolutions of tragedies are also talked about under the framework of myth-archetypes.The atonement,spiritual rebirth and the quest of truth and identity are all the dissolutions of the tragedies,which are also archetypes that recur frequently in literary works.In conclusion,the thesis points out that,it’s meaningful to conduct a myth-archetypal analysis of the novel because of its abundance of allusions and archetypes of mythology,and it’s also possible to analyze tragedies not only with a comparison with the mythologies outwardly,but also to make an analysis of tragedy within the internal structure of the novel with the help of archetypal theories.