Quest for Identity in the Contemporary American Bildungsroman: Sue Monk Kidd’s The Secret Life of Bees, Alice Sebold’s the Lovely Bones, and Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud&Incredibly Close

Abstract

This thesis analyzes how the bildungsroman as a genre born in the 18th century in Germany, has evolved and become universalized throughout the historical journey it has undertaken, how partly overlapping but at times contradictory definitions proposed by different critics have echoed in the contemporary pieces, and how some controversial concepts including race, gender, religion, family have been dealt with in the context of the bildungsroman. Three prominent examples of the contemporary American bildungsroman, namely Sur Monk Kidd s The Secret Life of Bees, Alice Sebold s The Lovely Bones, and Jonathan Safran Foer s Extremely Loud Incredibly Close are analyzed in terms of the developmental process of their protagonists, and with reference to their representations of traditional and novel qualities of the bildungsroman. The individuation and maturation processes of the young apprentices alternating between self-destruction and self-preservation under the shadow of losses and agonizing