Az Eszterházy Károly Tanárképző Főiskola Tudományos Közleményei. 2002. Vol. 8. Eger Journal of American Studies.(Acta Academiae Paedagogicae Agriensis : Nova series ; Tom. 28)

Studies - László Dányi: On the Bad Side of the Fence: Fiascos of Southern Ethos

"birds", Peyton rises high into the unreal and immediately falls down to meet her tragedy, when she sees the vanity of the world and believes in the hope of Christian immortality. All the absurdity of her family life and of the surrounding world culminate is Peyton's character, who is involved in absurd situations. After realizing the absurdity of her situation she as a modern character who tries to synthetize the elements of her existence, to find the center and to escape to the transcendental order (Hassan 268), is unable to rationalize the irrational universe and to struggle against it, finally, commits suicide. In his absurdist fiction Styron does not create distorted worlds as much as he perceives that the world is distorted (Hauck 11). He is a recorder of distortion and of those crippled characters whose lives end in tragedy. To find a raison d'etre, the characters try to rationalize their struggles and failures, and in this process they make objects of themselves. While searching for meaning they escape to the past, or to psychoanalysis, or they create dream worlds based on the moral code of Christianity, or on the conventional value system of the nostalgic Old South, and they are unable to live up to their ideals. They do not always question these ideals and they cannot laugh. They tend to become agelaste characters (Vajda 126) not only the way they think and possess the clear and ultimate truth, but in the way that they are confirmed that the ultimate truth and ethos exist even if they are on the bad side. WORKS CITED Boyd, Maurice, and Worchester, Donald. American Civilization: An Introduction to the Social Sciences. Boston: Allyn and Bacon, 1969. Critchley, Simon. The Ethics of Deconstruction. Oxford: Blackwell, 1992. Hassan, Ihab. The Dismemberment of Orpheus. Madison: University of Wisconsin, 1982. 184