本文是一篇英语毕业论文，笔者认为拉希莉在《低地》中为虚无和人与人之间的关系的解读提供了另一种方案。她试图寻找虚无和异化中的人之存在的出路，鼓励在世的人勇敢地面对并超越生活的虚无，为自己的人生创造出更多的意义。
Chapter I Introduction
1.1 Introduction to Jhumpa Lahiri and The Lowland
Jhumpa Lahiri was born to Bengali in 1967. Her works, both novels and short stories, received great acclaim when they were published. Lahiri’s writing style is one of the reasons why her novels are so well received. The characters under her novels are emotional, sensitive and detailed. Her first collection of short stories, Interpreter of Maladies (1999), won the 2000 Pulitzer Prize for Literature, making Lahiri the youngest person ever to win the prize. So far, she has published four novels in English, two collections of short stories and three novels including Interpreter of Maladies (1999), The Namesake(2003), Unaccustomed Earth(2008), The Lowland(2013) and Whereabout(2021). In recent years, she began to learn Italian by herself and work as a translator. In 2016, she published her autobiography in Italian and her first novel in Italian, Dove mi trovo. Compared with other writers, Lahiri’s works are not many, but each of her novels can be called masterpieces, and these novels have won many awards. In addition to the Pulitzer, Lahiri has also won The O. Henry Prizes, the PEN/Hemingway Award and the Asian American Literary Award and the 2017 PEN/Malamud Award for Excellence in the Short Story. In addition to her numerous awards for fiction, Lahiri has also received many personal honors. In 2015, Jhumpa Lahiri was awarded the prestigious National Humanities Medal by the NEH at the White House. She was named Commander of the Italian Republic in 2019 by President Sergio Mattarella. The literary influence of Lahiri as a new generation writer cannot be ignored, as can be seen from the various literary awards and personal accolades she has won.
1.2 Introduction to Sartre’s Existentialism
Existentialism is one of the most important philosophical thoughts in the twentieth century of the western world. The very beginning of existentialism is in German in 1920s and it gets further development in France in 1930s and spreads around the Europe during and after the World War Two period. When it comes to 1950s, the development of existentialism has reached to its peak. It developed so quick that almost all the westerners named themselves as an existentialist philosopher. The prevalence of existentialist philosophy has a lot to do with the advocation of a group of existentialist philosophy. Sartre is one of them. Sartre not only endowed existentialism with new connotation but also promoted the development of this philosophy. Compared with other philosophies, existentialism is unique in that it takes individual as its starting point and studies human existence as its theme. The term existentialism originated from French philosopher Gabriel Marcel who used this word to indicate Jean-Paul Sartre, Karl Jaspers, Martin Heidegger, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Soren Kierkegaard and Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche. Existentialism is not only a philosophy, but also an ideological movement. Existentialism originated in Germany and was further developed in France. In the mid-19th century, after two world wars in Europe, especially in Germany and France, people’s lives suffered great destruction. The people of the whole Europe were traumatized by the war spiritually, and their thoughts became scattered and desperate. People are full of despair and anxiety about life and fall into pessimism. Under such a background, German philosophers Karl Theodor Jaspers and Heidegger began to study the problem of human existence. Heidegger published his masterpiece Being and Time, which also means that existentialism was formed in 1927. Soon after, Sartre published his most influential work, Being and Nothingness, which marked the maturation of existentialism and the formation of a liberal-centered French existentialism. Sartre’s existentialism is a combination of Husserl’s phenomenology and Heidegger’s existentialism. On the basis of the predecessors’ theory, Sartre constructed his own existentialism theory. His existentialism is mainly embodied in his two books Existentialism is a Humanism (1945) and Being and Nothingness (1943).
Chapter II Nothingness: Sartre and Lahiri’s Mutual Understanding of the Existential Problem
2.1 Being and Nothingness: Sartre’s Question of Existence
Sartre’s existentialism points out that the world is absurd and life is painful. This is the basic premise of Sartre’s existentialism. The problem of human existence is one of the basic problems of existentialism. In Sartre’s existentialism, nothingness is the starting point of life and the condition and premise of self-achievement. People realize themselves through activities in circumstances, and also detect their own existence in circumstances. All these are achieved through nihilization. The function of nothingness lies in the demarcation and qualitative of the human world. In this section, it is going to explore the three basic viewpoints of Sartre’s existentialism: the absurdity of the world, the nature of existence and the feeling of repulsion.
2.1.1 Absurdity of the World
In different historical periods, absurdity has different specific meanings. In a broad sense absurdity refers to the expression of human alienation and limitation. If we comprehend absurdity from the angle of philosophical epistemology, absurdity is the inevitable product of the contradiction among nature, society and human. To some extent, absurdity reflects the crisis of modern society, especially the modern industrial society. After entering the modern society, people’s material life has been improved to a certain extent. However, the sense of crisis brought to people’s life by the industrial society only increased and did not decrease. Human rationality was shaken in many fields, and people’s yearning and longing for life were attacked by reality.
2.2 Existence Problems in The Lowland
The Lowland is Jhumpa Lahiri’s second feature-length novel about the survival of Subhash, Udayan, Gauri and Bela. Sartre defined man as being-for-itself, which is a kind of being that being is what it is not and is not what it is. This kind of being has transcendence and constantly changes and develops with the passage of time. Therefore, man is a kind of being that cannot be completely defined. Man has the ability to choose freely. Existence precedes essence. Even if the world is full of undefined nothingness, contingency is filled in people’s life and objective material world is existence. Although people’s lives are nothingness, people are still free. Therefore, human being can create and define their own existence. Sartre believes that when people make free choices, they should bear the consequences of free choices. As a result, the freedom of making choices are full of pain. In The Lowland, everyone makes free choices about their own existence, and they bear different consequences for their choices. In this section, it mainly discusses the survival problems faced by different people in the absurd and nihilistic world in the novel The Lowland, as well as the reality of people in the objective world shown in the novel, and the dilemma of finding the meaning of self-existence in the reality that is hard to choose and hard to define.
Chapter Ⅲ Reaction to Nothingness: Divergence of Sartre and Lahiri on Others .......... 36
3.1“Hell is Other People”: Sartre’s Proposition ................ 36
3.1.1 Subjectivity and the Self-identity ............................. 36
3.1.2 The Threat of Others ................................... 38
Chapter Ⅳ Transcending Nothingness: Meaning Construction in The Lowland ............. 55
4.1 Lahiri Against Sartre: to Exist as the Way to Transcend Nothingness ................... 55
4.1.1 Re-checking Sartre’s Proposition of“Being as Nothingness” .... 56
4.1.2 Re-interpreting Lahiri’s Position of“Existing rather than Being” .................. 57
Conclusion ............................ 72
Chapter IV Transcending Nothingness: Meaning Construction in The Lowland
4.1 Lahiri Against Sartre: to Exist as the Way to Transcend Nothingness
Sartre’s existentialism believes that in a world full of contingency, human actions are futile and existence eventually returns to nothingness. Existence is empty, meaning is empty. Sartre’s attitude towards human survival and search for meaning in the absurd world is pessimistic. Although Lahiri agrees with Sartre’s existentialism that the world is absurd and existence is nothingness, these can be changed through human actions and active survival in Lahiri’s novel. This part analyzes Lahiri’s rebuttal to Sartre’s view of the existence of nothingness. Through reexamining Sartre’s view that existence is nothingness and Lahiri’s way of being, this thesis probes into Lahiri’s views on the world and meaning construction in her novels.
4.1.1 Re-checking Sartre’s Proposition of “Being as Nothingness”
Sartre put forward the view that existence is nothingness, which can be analyzed from two perspectives: the existence of self and the relationship between self and other. In Sartre’s existentialist philosophy, nothingness is the origin of world meaning. “Man must create himself in nothingness, nothingness is the starting point of life.” (Yu 152-159) Nothingness is also a kind of being, and Sartre defines nothingness as being for itself. He believes that existence is logically prior meaning that existence comes before nothingness, and nothingness entangles existence. It is the existence of being that nothingness can exist, that is to say, man is the ground of the existence of nothingness. The source of nothingness lies in man, and the essence of man is nothingness. Well into the twentieth century, Nietzsche declared that God is dead, and the disappearance of God freed freedom from its many constraints. Sartre took this freedom to its extreme. He exposed man to freedom completely, without any regularity or certainty.
Conclusion
This thesis aimed to explore the existentialist thoughts in Lahiri’s novel The Lowland and the author’s own thoughts on existentialism from the perspective of Sartre’s existentialism. The thesis discussed the existence of human beings to transcend nothingness through the construction of meaning so as to seek for self-meaning and self-value in Lahiri’s novels The Lowland. The Lowland specifically talks about the construction and loss of the meaning of survival in the real life of four self-centered beings: Subhash, Udayan, Gauri and Bela. In the absurd world, different people constantly transcend themselves to find and construct their own meaning. Through the narration of the novel, Lahiri provides a way for people to survive in real life that is to live and transcend. Lahiri’s works mostly feature ethnic minorities as main characters, which is related to her own social background. Lahiri is an Indian-American writer who grew up with many Indian immigrants and learned about the challenges they face in a new country. Therefore, Lahiri’s early works mainly show the discomfort of immigrant groups as the other in other countries and the dilemma of self-identity recognition. In writing The Lowland, Lahiri put her own perspective on humanity, which is different from her previous works. What is reflected in the novel is Lahiri’s thinking and answer to the question of human existence. Therefore, this thesis analyzed the human existence and the meaning of existence in the novel The Lowland from the perspective of Sartre’s existentialism. As a kind of philosophy that discuss the being, Sartre’s existentialism elaborates existence from different angles.
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