earticle

영어

This paper aims to examine the way that American businessman Christopher Newman experiences and interprets European culture and people with his own confined perspectives in The American. The hero cannot be acknowledged and accepted by the aristocratic Bellegardes, not only because the family judges Newman by his social status but also because he has a lack of manners and a weak grasp of the complexity of deeper human values. Above all, Newman is throughly limited by his commercialistic assumptions and self-assurance based on his strong confidence in the power of his wealth. In addition, he does not react to the new cultural environment flexibly, and he holds fast to the optimistic belief that the world is for his taking and tries to apply a ‘black and white' moral principle by force. As a result, his self-reflection and the possibility of the perceptive growth are confined, and his experiences do not give an impetus to the active development of perception. Furthermore, the main causes of Newman's perceptive failure also come from deficiencies of moral imagination and sensibility.