A Study on the Spatial Structure of Dreams in Bernard Malamud’s “Man in the Drawer”

Abstract

Bernard Malamud was a well-known novelist who ever won many American National prizes for fiction, national arts award for literature association, as well as Pulitzer Prize. It can be imagined that they earned him high evaluation and prestige.Though most of Malamud's works are full-length novels, he never stopped writing short stories even from the very beginning of his writing career. As a result, Malamud could not avoid admitting that he preferred to write short stories in one preface, at a time when he assembled his twenty five short stories into a book in 1983. Besides laying emphasis on lots of fun deriving from short stories writing, Malamud also stood out for the rigorous structure which should be featured by short stories. He asserted that rigorous structure is not only a must for literary works, but an essential basis.Consequently, the study aimed to look into the spatial structure of dreams in Malamud's "Man in the Drawer", hoping for a glimpse of the leading edge. The study was, first of all, to categorize between manifest content and latent content of dreams in Malamud's "Man in the Drawer"; then, to parse the dreams in Malamud's short story in terms of spatial structure of equivalence of Jurij Lotman's theory, a semiologist; after that, based on the concept of semiotics, to highlight the language used in "Man in the Drawer", in terms of the natural language as the so-called primary language, as well as its form and content; at length, by the chance of entering Malamud's personal language world, to probe into the structure of its semiotic system with the aim of understanding the relations between the semantic world in the dreams of Malamud's stories and the real world.