| Summary: | 博士 === 國立高雄師範大學 === 英語學系 === 106 === There was a time when there existed in the minds of men fixed and certain meaning; however, history and science have moved them in the direction of the eclipse of fixed and certain meaning. Modernists feel the anguish of this eclipse of meaning, and postmodernists especially reject any idea of certainty of meaning. If the meaning of texts turns out to be obscure, how do we understand a text? What is a meaningful way to understand a text? How do we judge the value of a text? We can ask further: How do we judge what substantial literature is? If there is no certainty of meaning, how do we know there is a substantial literary work? Thus, to find out a meaningful approach to examine a literary text is the fundamental step to take before understanding and judging a literary text. Contemporary literary theories, such as reader response, deconstruction, postcolonial criticism, postmodernism, psychoanalytic criticism, feminist criticism, and gay/lesbian criticism and queer theory, are not sufficient to serve as an approach that can help us to analyze and find out the essential value of a literary work. At most, they disclose a different angle of viewpoint, which is founded on an objective meaning of the text. Thus, this dissertation intends to advance an objective method to approach a literary work, so that it can help us to grasp the essential value of a literary text that makes the work substantial.
First of all, literature presents perennial themes and all those themes converge on one question—that is, the meaning of life, and the meaning of life serves as a standard to judge whether a literary work is good or not. This dissertation examines and compares two representative works, Waiting for Godot and Ecclesiastes.
Chapter two makes some contribution to the unraveling of Waiting for Godot through a perennial thematic analysis of life’s circumstances that indicates a deep-seated vanity.
Chapter three deals exclusively with the human existential predicament in Ecclesiastes: humans dwell in vanity mainly because death exists and may be the end of the existence of every human mortal.
Chapter four makes a comparison of the two works: Waiting for Godot does not propose a way to cope with the meaninglessness of existence or find the meaning of life—if there even is one—because the world in Waiting for Godot is evidently a world without the possibility of the existence of transcendental help or hope, but Ecclesiastes does provide the possibility of overcoming vanity and the possibility of attaining meaning, on account of the existence of God, especially when it is interpreted, as it should be, as an integral part of the entire Bible.
The last chapter concludes with the conditions necessary for a meaningful life: the promise of eternity and the existence of transcendental help from an Entity who is omniscient, omnipotent, and omnibenevolent. Consequently, we can conclude that the meaning of life is love, and since literature presents love, we can say that it is meaningful and substantial, apart from the question of a work’s literary quality.
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