Alienation,Bewilderment,Reconstruction:A Lacanian Interpretation Of The Protagonist’s Construction Of Subjectivity In The Magus

John Fowles is one of the most famous postmodernist writers in Britain.His representative works are The Collector,The French Lieutenant’s Woman,and The Magus,they are widely popular in Britain and the United States,just like shining pearls in the treasure-house of post-modern literature.Among all his works,The Magus,as Fowles’s maiden work in the real sense,is a concentrated display of his creative ideas,which has special significance in his creative career and is an important material that cannot be ignored in Fowles’s research.Fowles employs skillful postmodern writing techniques in his novel The Magus,which is full of his philosophical thoughts on human existence and personal growth.The novel is set in the Victorian era in England.It tells the story of Nicholas,the protagonist,who enters a remote Greek island as a teacher by chance and gets acquainted with the local rich businessman Conchis.As a result,he gradually falls into the trap of Conchis and becomes a member of the godgame directed by Conchis,then spiritually grows up during that process.The novel consists of 78 chapters in three volumes.In this work,Fowles discusses the freedom and confusion experienced by the protagonist in the process of growth,the decisive influence of trauma on the generation of his personality,and the philosophical thinking of human existence.Scholars at home and abroad have mainly studied the novel from the perspectives of existentialism,feminism,and mysticism,other philosophical studies are relatively sparse.This thesis adopts Lacan’s theory of Three Orders to discuss the process of self-construction of the protagonist,and analyzes how the protagonist seeks his own identity and fulfills his desire in this era full of fragmentation and hindrance under the postmodern society,then dissects Fowles’s philosophical thinking for such existence predicament,his exploration of the possibility and feasibility of individual self-construction,thus to show Fowles’s compassionate care.Jacques Lacan is one of the representatives of the modern French psychoanalysis school,on the basis of integrating the previous theories,he proposed the theory of the Three Orders,which means the Imaginary Order,the Symbolic Order,and the Real Order,the three of them constitute the field of subjectivity generation.This thesis tries to interpret John Fowles’s The Magus from this philosophical perspective by means of a close reading of the text.The main body of this thesis consists of three parts,taking the three orders of Lacan’s Theory Three Orders as the demarcation point,and analyzing the process of self-construction of the hero Nicholas in sequence.The first order is the Symbolic Order,which imprisons Nicholas and causes his subject to be alienated.The second order is the Imaginary Order,which analyzes how the hero’s self-construction in the mirror stage is affected by the "others",in this stage he is satisfied with the false perfect image in the mirror and gets lost between the mirror and reality during his interaction with others.The third order is the Real Order,which is the most ethereal stage among these three orders,during this stage,Nicholas attains the completion of the construction of his subjectivity through incompleteness.All in all,the ultimate perfect self-subject is nonexistent,the only way to complete the reconstruction of the self-subject is to admit that this is a forever-changing progress.