Abstract:

The American playwright Eugene O’Neill is known as a sentimental and complicated person whose dramas, based on his personalized repentance and tragic narrative as well as the individual’s inner conflicts, interrogate the sinking souls and show his concern over the people’s life crisis and spiritual alienation and seek in the chaos and abyss of human nature a home for the soul. By probing into his life and interpreting his dramas, the author of the paper attempts to extricate from the previous preconceived judgment in text analysis and hopes to search for the underlying motivation of O’Neill’s spiritual trauma and soul narrative so as to achieve an interactive and objective interpretation of O’Neill’s dramas by combining O’Neill’s personal experience with his individual life narrative. With the research, the author puts forward that O’Neill’s narrative is ethical and inseparable from his religious belief. O’Neill has spent his whole life struggling for and pursuing spiritual support and expressed in his dramas the suffering, hesitation and contradiction brought about by his abandonment of the religious faith, and the redemption of the sinking soul. To have a profound insight into O’Neill’s spiritual pilgrim may help us to better understand his ethical narrative and ethical selection, and in particular to see a true O’Neill and his religious complex through his literary writings.

Keywords: Eugene O'Neill; dramas; religion; faith; ethical narrative

摘要：

美国剧作家尤金·奥尼尔是一个悲情而复杂的灵魂,他的剧作以特定的忏悔话语和悲剧叙事,凭借个体的内心冲突,叩问灵魂,关注人的生存危机和精神异化,在人性的裂变与深渊中,探寻安顿精神的家园。本文通过对奥尼尔的生平研究以及剧本的分析和解读,旨在寻找隐藏在奥尼尔精神创伤和灵魂叙事后面的原由,摆脱以往文本分析中先入为主的判断,将奥尼尔的生活经历和剧作的个体生命叙事相结合,进行互动有据的阐释。分析发现,奥尼尔的叙事是伦理的,他的戏剧叙事与其宗教信仰有着千丝万缕的联系。奥尼尔一生都在苦苦追索摆脱信仰荒原的精神支柱,并将个体生命被宗教遗弃后的痛苦、彷徨和矛盾,直到沉沦的灵魂得以救赎的经历再现于剧本中。探索奥尼尔灵魂救赎的历程可以准确地掌握他的伦理叙事和伦理选择,也有助于还原一个真实的奥尼尔及其宗教情结。

关键词: 尤金·奥尼尔, 戏剧, 宗教, 信仰, 伦理叙事