From Discovery to Self-Discovery: A Study of Four Adventure Stories: Herman Melville's Moby-Dick, Conrad' Heart of Darkness, Jack London's The Sea-Wolf, and Saul Bellow's Henderson the Rain King.

• Main Authors: Richard Li, 李延熹
• Other Authors: Malzahn, Manfred
• Format: Others
• Language: en_US
• Published: 1996
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/01258229559159358081

碩士 === 國立中正大學 === 外國語文學系 === 84 === In this thesis, I shall attempt to illustrate the common features of four first-person sea and African adventure stories that mark them as belonging to what I propose to call the novel of self-discovery, as a subgenre of the novel of adventure. Their plots feature a journey into the unknown, the protagonists' confrontation with violence, and their ultimate return. If we accept the four narrators as the fictional authors, these four texts operate on two levels; each of them tells two stories: the story of disaster, and the story of the narrator's recovering health by composing his own adventure story. Part One will focus on the survivor-narrator's motivations for going to sea or to Africa. I will then interpret the narrators' experiences in the unknown world and how the narrators are affected by the heroes, in Part Two of my thesis. Part Three will concentrate on the question whether the narrators' experiences reshape their original selves. After these discussions, I will assess the results of my attempt to describe my four chosen texts as novels of self- discovery, with specific reference to the idea of the novel as a bourgeois adaptation of the epic.