An Analysis Of Go Set A Watchman From The Perspective Of Initiation Story

Harper Lee,a typical Southern female writer born in Alabama,has been awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Literature in To Kill a Mockingbird.This book also won her the Presidential Medal of Freedom,the highest honor of the United States.Harper Lee's second novel,Go Set a Watchman written with peculiar narrative patterns via combining the third person narrative with interior monologue and flashback,etc,describes a story of 26-year-old Jean Louise who returns to her hometown,only to find that her loving relatives,especially Atticus,have become racists.The author gives a realistic depiction to the scene of culture,life and society in southern towns in the 1950s and the difficulty of her growth in such a complex environment.Growing process is a common and indispensable period in life.For southern teenagers,the distinct cultural elements of the South,such as enslavement,race,class and moral orientation,are the historical burden they have to face on growing-up process.Based on the theory of initiation story,this thesis attempts to interpret Go Set a Watchman as a typical as well as peculiar Bildungsroman from three perspectives:the content,character shaping and the creation background of the story.Finally,it focuses on the artistic features of the novel to highlight the theme of growth.Considering Initiation stories are mostly autobiographical,this thesis firstly focuses on the plots of the novel and its autobiographical components from the aspect of content to reflect the growth of the protagonist.Then the thesis illustrates how Go Set a Watchman embodies the features of initiation story from the angle of characterizations and explores how they exert influence on the protagonist.The positive spiritual guide helps Jean Louise see social reality clearly,yet the negative guide strengthens her determination to fight for racial equality.Besides,the thesis also digs into the reasons for growth difficulty on the basis of the complex social political and cultural context in South.At last,it analyzes the artistic features used in the novel,claiming that the open-ending,the peculiar narrative patterns,and the symbolic images,all of which have greatly deepened the theme of growth.Race is still a moral challenge for Americans.The innovation of this thesis is via combining the tense racial issues with growth of a white woman to reveal the perplexity racial prejudice has brought to people,thus broadening the research field of initiation story to a certain extent.