| Cormac Mc Carthy is a respected contemporary American novelist and playwright.His novels are dedicated to depicting the lives of the lower and middle class people in the United States and along the U.S.-Mexico border,especially his Western novels Blood Meridian,or the Evening Redness in the West,All the Pretty Horses,The Crossing,Cities of the Plain and No Country for Old Men,while reflecting the life of the people,it is even more beyond the anthropocentric vision,revealing part of the natural subject and biocentric ideas.This thesis takes Mc Carthy’s five western novels as the object of study,explores the construction and generation of the thing narratives in the novels,grasps the characteristics of his thing narratives,analyzes the unique "things" and "human" thinking in Mc Carthy’s works,and attempts to describe the poetic expression of the thing narratives in Mc Carthy’s works,revealing their ecological and cultural revelations while explaining the tragic fate of his fictional characters.This thesis first focuses on the construction and production of the thing narratives in Mc Carthy’s western novels.In the past,when interpreting the narrative strategies in Mc Carthy’s western novels,literary criticism has often focused on the author’s transcendent anthropocentric ideological expressions,but to a certain extent has neglected the important status and role of the thing narratives in Mc Carthy’s western novels,and the narratives about things have often been subordinated by critics.Based on this,this paper will focus on the narrative of things in Mc Carthy’s novels and conduct a comprehensive investigation in the context of the history and culture of the American West.The first chapter of this thesis explores the process of constructing the thing narrative by analyzing the "natural landscape," "transportation," and "wilderness animals" that play different roles in the narrative process of the novel.The second chapter explores the idea of "things" and "people" behind the thing narrative presented in Mc Carthy’s novels,and shows Mc Carthy’s rebellion against anthropocentrism and the reconstruction of the concept of "thing" from three aspects:the subject-object struggle between human beings and things,the creation of a network of material relations,and the loss of the subject faced by human beings.The third chapter of this thesis explores the poetic expression of the thing narratives in Mc Carthy’s works.On the one hand,the writer uses Western fiction as a vehicle to depict a dramatic Western epic,portraying several representative Western characters,revealing the inescapable role of the corresponding objects behind the tragic fate of the characters,and demonstrating the unique art of the thing narrative tragedy.On the other hand,the writer expresses his condemnation of the phenomenon of nature being destroyed by human encroachment by showing the ecological dilemma caused by the competition between things and humans.Finally,by focusing on the powerlessness of human beings under the technological civilization,the writer emphasizes the powerful power of things and the disappointment that human beings cannot really control science and technology.On this basis,this thesis argues that behind the writer’s unique thing narrative creation,there is a deep sympathy and concern for the fate of individual human beings and a deep concern and expectation for human civilization. |
