Abstract

Chinese and foreign scholars have conducted extensive research on Updike’s works and achieved fruitful results. In several of his novels, Updike describes a series of problems that modern people encounter at work, family, and feeling, and explores ways and means to overcome these problems. Chinese and foreign scholars have explored this issue from different perspectives and achieved certain results, but few scholars have studied it from the perspective of memory and imagination. Memory and imagination are an active exploration of this issue by Updike, but they are usually overlooked by researchers. This paper tries to use Marcuse’s discourse on memory and imagination to explore the survival difficulties encountered by the characters in Updike’s three novels, analyze how the characters in the works use memory and imagination as a way to get rid of the predicament, and explore the impact of memory and imagination on reality. Through analysis, this paper hopes to explore the answers to the above questions.

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