Endless Quests For The Self

Since the publication of the “Vampire Chronicles” by American novelist Anne Rice,it has successively triggered the “Vampire Fever” throughout the whole world and further aroused interest from the critics as well as readers.Besides,Strange Stories from a Chinese Studio is a great Chinese classical work with a collection of more than 490 supernatural stories,completed in more than three centuries ago by Pu Sung-ling,which has become the peak of Chinese mythical tales.Although Pu Sung-ling and Anne Rice come from different nations and live in different times,their supernatural stories are,in fact,a mirror of human society revealing the basic reality of human life,the common thoughts of human existence and the mental problems of all human beings,which ultimately reflect the endless quests for the self.By adopting a parallel study of comparative literature on the basis of close reading method in combination with some related concepts of narratology,this thesis aims to analyze the differences and similarities between Strange Stories from the Chinese Studio and the “Vampire Chronicles” from the aspects of characters,themes and focalization as well,emphasizing similarities on the endless quests for the self.The first chapter talks about how the self under the mask of vampires and ghosts in the name of love constructs the relationship between the monstrous and the ordinary.The second chapter talks about the philosophical quests for the self from the dimensions of culture,religion and individual.The last chapter tries to analyze how focalization as a distinctive aspect in western classical narratology employed in the quests for the self contributes to characterization and themes through changing different kinds of focalization such as external focalization and internal focalization in the two writers’ works.This thesis finds that those “monstrous” supernatural characters share the same features,fates and emotions which are actually the images of “ordinary” human beings.Although unavoidably differ in backgrounds of culture and poetics,their works share the similarities of endless quests for the self in essence on expressing universal themes common to all men in all languages: culture orientations,religion faith,individual loneliness etc.The flexible usage of different kinds of focalization adopted in these works contributes to characterization and explores the themes employed in the quests for the self in depth and width with contrast analysis of the focalizer and the focalized.