earticle

영어

Anne Tyler is one of the most significant contemporary writers and a highly prolific writer who has published 18 novels to date. She is also known as an intensely private writer labeled the Greta Garbo of the literary world who rarely does book tours, avoids publicity, and does not grant face-to-face interviews. In spite of the richness of her work and sizeable popular audience, she received little scholarly assessment and academic discussion analysis until the 1990s. Tyler’s novels are not only readable and enjoyable but also thought-provoking. Her various characters are painfully realistic, eccentric, and ironically charming. Family relationships are at the core in nearly all her novels set in Baltimore, but her characters end up establishing identity in opposition of family myth. In order to introduce and define Tyler as a masterful fictional realist and a humanist, this paper critically reads her 1998 novel, A Patchwork Planet, which tells of an unheroic, eccentric, uncertain, and lonely protagonist from an affluent American family. Especially, the paper suggests that Shakespeare’s speaker in “Sonnet 29” and Tyler’s narrator in A Patchwork Planet are similar. As self-observers, the insecure young men in 17th century England and 20th century America undergo the ongoing process of self-affirmation and self-development. While emphasizing the individual relationships with others outside one’s immediate family, Tyler realistically portrays the inward journey of the narrator in which he is overwhelmed by loneliness, isolation, and defeat and then gradually comes to terms with self-integrity and self-worth.