夢魘抑或希望？:露薏絲•勞瑞的《記憶傳授人》與青少年反烏托邦文學

Abstract

露薏絲•勞瑞的青少年反烏托邦小說《記憶傳授人》，近年來已獲得越來越多年輕讀者與文學評論家的肯定。勞瑞以獨特的輕描淡寫筆法(understatement)，呈現出人類於意識控制與科學控管下，所營造出的一個記憶無存的反烏托邦世界。本文旨在分析《記憶傳授人》中的社會體制，藉由檢視其權力結構和對人民的科技化控管，省視此種社會制度對於青少年的影響。此外，小說中呈現記憶、感知及生死概念的喪失導致青少年成長經驗及發展之迥異，本文因此將檢視於此小說框架下的重要議題，包括記憶，死亡和青少年閾限(liminal adolescence)。 青少年文學中，逐漸興起之將青少年描繪為社會希望或少年英雄的趨勢，此亦為反烏托邦小說《記憶傳授人》中之顯著特色。近年來青少年文學傾向揭露世界陰暗面、對抗腐敗之成人社會，年少主角因而被塑造為天賦異稟之少年英雄或能力超凡之預視者的角色，以改變世界現狀，如《記憶傳授人》中所示。少年英雄之文類帶來越來越多的啟發與反思，而此將有助於年輕讀者重估世界現狀中的價值觀及意識形態。

Lois Lowry’s The Giver, an adolescent dystopian novel, gains more and more credit today from both young readers and critics of adolescent literature. With the understated narrative, Lowry presents a dystopian world where people do not have memory under the mind control and scientific regulation of the authority. This thesis aims to analyze the system of the community of The Giver by examining its power and technological control over people to see the impact of such a regime on adolescents. Furthermore, the loss of memory, perception and concept of life and death results in an untraditional experience of adolescent growth and development in the novel. This thesis will inspect different aspects of adolescence in this context of the novel and explore the issues of memory, death and liminal adolescence. The rising tendency of depicting teenagers as social hope or young hero in adolescent literature is also a distinguishing feature in the dystopian context of The Giver. These days adolescent literature tends to disclose the dark side of the world and corrupted adult society, and thus young protagonists are given the role of a gifted young hero or a foreseer with superpower to change the status quo as in The Giver. There are more and more inspiration and reflection brought by this genre of young hero in young adult novels, and this will contribute to the evaluation of values and ideology of the present world by young readers in this world today.