《奥吉·马奇历险记》中的家园叙事

Home Narrative in The Adventures of Augie March

《奥吉·马奇历险记》是美国犹太裔小说家索尔·贝娄的一部自传式流浪汉小说。小说以第一人称的叙述方式,回顾了叙事者兼主人公奥吉在充满偶然性的庸常的日常生活中对有意义的生活方式的探寻,具象化地反映了奥吉的家园梦想和精神寄托。然而,小说中的家园叙事并未引起关注。本文借助戈德曼的文学社会学批评理论中的观点,通过分析《奥吉·马奇历险记》中的家园叙事,指出该小说中的流浪叙事与主人公对家园的追寻体现出贝娄作为流散作家的家园意识及其对犹太民族传统的记忆。同时,本文还指出,小说主人公出逃—回归—出逃的人生轨迹,揭示出现代人的孤独与心灵无处着落以及作家回避社会现实的精神寄托;而主人公对有价值的人生的追求及其对简朴温馨的家园的渴求则反映出美国超验主义思想对贝娄小说创作的影响。

The Adventures of Augie March is an autobiographical picaresque novel written by Saul Bellow, a Jewish American novelist. The narrator in the novel recalls in the first person pronoun the pursuit of a meaningful way of life of the major character Augie in the mediocre daily life which is full of contingency, and represents Augie's dream of home and his spiritual sustenance. However, the home narrative in this novel has been ignored. In light of the views put forward by Lucien Goldmann in his theory of the sociology of literature, this article points out that the picaresque narrative in the novel and Augie's pursuit of home embody Bellow's viewpoint of home as a diaspora writer and his memory of Jewish tradition by analyzing the home narrative in The Adventures of Augie March. Meanwhile, the article argues that Augie's adventures and his being always on the road reveal the state of solitude and restlessness of human beings in the modern society and Bellow's spiritual sustenance of avoiding social reality. And then the article contends that Augie's pursuit of meaningful life, his individualism and his imagination of a simple and warm home in a place very much similar to Thoreau's Walden indicate that Bellow was influenced by American transcendentalism in his literary creation.