"Rites Of Passage" In David Lodge’s Novels

David Lodge(1935—)is famous both as an established writer and as a respected critic.Lodge is acute at observing the world and is delighted in reconstructing the world through his fiction.Lodge sticks to his faith in the value of literature and humanity postmodern literature.As a Catholic,Lodge shows concerns for the faith crisis for Catholic after the Second Vatican Council,the most fundamental of which is the reliability of afterlife and heaven as promised by the church.Deemed as "chronicler of his times",Lodge pays close attention to the spiritual predicaments,especially the loss of self in the highly consumption culture.As "a writer of highly self-consciousness",Lodge bases his novels on his own life experience,and depicts a richly humanistic life comedy about the meaning of being alive and death.Lodge never quits seeking the value of life,nor the way of healing and saving.The above three aspects are respectively reflected in Paraduse News,Therapy and Deaf Sentence.The "rites of passage" shown in his novels represent his efforts of seeking value and salvation for people in post-industrial society.This thesis adopts the theory of "rites of passage" and the theory of liminality to analyze how protagonists in Lodge’s novels go through "rites of passage" to come to terms with those crises.Anthropologists Arnold van Gennep and Victor Turner are representatives in symbol studies and ritual studies.Gennep is recognized as the founder of folklore studies in France with his works on "rites of passage" which,according to Gennep,are marked by a threefold progression of successive ritual stages,namely,the separation or the pre-liminal,margin or the liminal,aggregation or the postliminal.Turner expands the boundaries applicative to the theories of liminality and beholds that ritual could serve to stabilize and restore the balance of society,especially during the process of social changes.Chapter One studies the crises that the protagonists are going through in the novels,namely,the religious faith crisis for Bernard in Paradise News,Tubby’s loss of self in Therapy and Paassmore’s understanding on being alive and death in Deaf Sentence.During the pre-liminal phase,the ritual participants are prompted to take actions to change their life..Chapter Two employs Turner’s liminality to explore how Bernard restores his faith in Hawaii,how Tubby seeks his self during his pilgrimage in Spain and how Desmond gains his savvy on the cycle of life and death.Liminality creates an aura of "out there" in which the participants are secluded in a relatively independent and temporary social structure boasting of formative possibility and intriguing the individual to ponder over his previous social structure.Chapter Three analyzes the third phase,that is,when protagonists reaggregate to their structure and come back with new perspectives on life.During this phrase,they are open for reflections over and readjustments to their understanding of life and themselves.In his novels,Lodge shows his reflections and concerns over the society among his witty words and sarcasm.He depicts people’s living condition and their beliefs in his works,embodying a widespread yet profound moral teaching in certain social and humanistic context.He creates dramas of social problem and demonstrates hopes for human beings with his extensive scope of observing and thinking.