Date of Award

3-1-2024

Thesis Type

PhD

Document Type

Thesis

Divisions

Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences

Department

Department of English

Institution

Universiti Malaya

Abstract

This dissertation investigates Richard Ford’s principal character, Frank Bascombe, in his four consecutive books, The Sportswriter, Independence Day, The Lay of the Land and Let Me Be Frank With You, from Hegel’s familial love and self-consciousness theory. The project’s four chapters examine Hegel’s general philosophy concerning the a for ementioned concepts and then provide a close reading analysis of their loss throughout Frank’s lifetime, which begins with the new post-divorce days in The Sportswriter in his mid-30s and ends with an old Frank in Let Me Be Frank With You. Richard Ford’s Bascombe Tetralogy challenges us to look at our definitions of modern family crisis, single parenthood, children of divorce and the consequent effects of losing the family orbit in the contemporary American lifestyle. This dissertation examines Ford’s unique narration techniques, which belong to ‘dirty realism’ as a modern literary movement in contemporary American fiction with such painstaking details and elaboration on characters’ mentality as well as their outside environment, including the role of local landscapes in their everyday life. However, I mainly focus on Frank’s ultimate and destructive loneliness as a significant result of his divorce and leaving his family realm behind. Hegel’s explanation of love is comprehensively chained to the existential conception of consciousness in such a way that one is obliged to know oneself to achieve the comfort of a peaceful mind and spirit, and the only key to reach this achievement is love. In other words, Hegel asserts that one can distinguish oneself from others once one’s mind and spirit are pacified by the power of love – both to love and to be loved. Consequently, Hegelian love, which is also importantly attributed to family relationships wherein familial love is demonstrated as the basis of the family, would be critically influential on the subsequent steps one takes in society in the future. However, there would be no absolute family survival unless the arms of love embrace family members. That is to say, family members will conserve their relationships and, as a result, get to know themselves if they realise how they love each other. Concentrating on Frank Bascombe’s alienation and sense of loss throughout the whole tetralogy, this thesis hopes to indicate that one main reason for Frank’s sense of estrangement, confusion and despair could lie in the loss of his original love and family life, which not only makes him go astray among phoney, transient relationships but also leads him to the traumatic Hegelian loss of self-consciousness, provoked by the lack of true love.

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Thesis (PhD) – Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, Universiti Malaya, 2023.

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