On Man's Limitation In Carson Mc Cullers' Novels

Carson McCullers who is one of the most distinguished southern writers in America of the 20^th century has a far-reaching influence on the American modern literature.Tennessee Williams praised her as a“miracle worker”and V.S.Pritchet described her as an“incomparable storyteller”.Most of her works had been adapted to popular plays which won her several Donald awards and the New York Drama Critics'Circle Award.Characterized by the setting of the southern town and characters with obvious physical and mental incapacity,McCullers'works disclose the social malady and predicaments of man's existence under the modern civilization of America through her circumstantial description of those characters'daily life and ambivalent psychological activities.This thesis employs Heidegger's existentialist theory,mainly based on his magnum opus,Being and Time,to delve into McCullers'philosophical ideas about man's existence and the issue of man's limitation in her five novels,namely The Heart is a Lonely Hunter,The Ballad of Sad Café,The Member of the Wedding,Reflections in a Golden Eye and Clock Without Hands.The thesis is divided into three chapters with introduction and conclusion.The introduction part briefly introduces McCullers and her five novels,Heidegger and his staple philosophical principles,as well as a literature review on McCullers both at home and abroad.Chapter One takes Dasein's physical limitation as a clue to explore how time and space restrict man's freedom from the outside-in and why.Chapter Two is committed to man's mental limitation,discussing about how the characters in novels are confined by their understanding and emotion which on another level also identify them.Chapter Three reveals the struggle they have made to come to grips with the limitation which makes them suffer.By compromising and accepting,the characters not only get released from but rather transcend the limitation and finally become themselves in the unity of Being.More crucially,it ends up with the emphasis on the thesis statement that the limitation equals to Dasein himself.The conclusion part summarizes the study of man's limitation in McCullers'novels and points out the significance and value of this thesis.