| Summary: | 碩士 === 中國文化大學 === 英國語文學研究所 === 96 === Abstract
The two times of world wars have inevitably casted enormous disturbance to the youth in American society so they cannot help but be skeptical toward traditional values inherited from their parents. The postwar bloom of economics has contributed to the industrialized prosperity, and the Middle Class becomes the hegemonic status to dominate society. All the well-recognized social virtues are praising upon productivity, turning econimic success into the absolute priority and making money becomes a religion by the bourgeois so the young intellectuals gather together to protest against the capitalist despotism from the bourgeois. They’re repulsed about the commodified homogeneity in society and also reluctant to get involved with social activities, banishing themselves as outsiders scattering around places to shun away from social obligations, living an emancipated lifestyle of Dionysian abandon with alcoholism and drug abuses, disdaining the Apollonian restraint under civilization, infatuated with existential nihilism as well as the negativity in oriental buddhism, indulging in their temporality without paying regards toward the future. There’re two postwar generations which celebrate rebellions: Lost Generation in 1920s and Beat Generation in 1950s. Such revolting spirit is well-expressed in its representative bibles: Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises in the 1920s and Jack Kerouac’s On the Road in the 1950s.
From the perspective of Heidegger’s “Dasein,” human existence loses its meaning as death comes along to terminate the being, and we cannot forsee our own demise so Dasein could only exist in the present which we could grasp. And Dasein is in constant flux as its finitude denies its significance. The rebels lead a lifestyle of temporality hedonistically to soothe such existential anxiety, using geographical movements to obliterate the industrialized constrait of schedule-abiding, just like the characters in these two novels are drifting everywhere in Europe or American highways. And their outward physical motions reflect their inward existential groundlessness; they have to continuously “go” to places to pursue the oblivion they crave. Further, the existential ground of self-identification is also in crisis, as Sartre mentions the notions of for-itself and in-itself which are our true self and social self, we have to suffer from the conflicts of for-itself and in-itself, making compromises to sacrifice our individuality (as a waitress has to behave like a waitress as social identity), and the rebels lose their self-identification when they choose to disobey the social norm so they’re harmed by such ambivalence as the existential ground is lost in self-denials. The women’s liberation after the WWI has also indirectly caused the imbalance of gender sphere, man and woman are hostile to each other, and the relationship of genders has deteriorated into having intercourses without commitment so the existential ground cannot thrive in the absence of love and spiritual warmth as the moderners mourn for such solitude and they neglect each other with irreconciled contempt.
I would like to tackle these two novels from the angles of Nietzsche’s Apollonian/Dionysian dualism in The Birth of Tragedy, cultural study and existential philosophies of Sartre and Heidegger’s, and each novel occupies one chapter with various items to resonate the other novel, so the reader could comprehend the analogy of Lost Generation and Beat Generation. And I would also apply the ideas in 1970s sociology classic The Future Shock to interpret the existential groundlessness in these two novels to admonish the reader about the social disintegration under the overchoice of subcults since super-industrialization compartmentalizes social environment as well as the loss of consensus in modern society.
|
|---|
