When it comes to modern writers, there are many representative modern writers, such as Thomas Stearns Eliot, William Butler Yeats, Cormac McCarthy, Margaret Atwood, and Martin Amis. In their novels, readers are asked to acknowledge their inherent difficulties and admit their current situation. Western modernity literature is part of the capitalist culture of the 20th century. It does not advocate that readers use works to reproduce life, but advocates starting from people's psychological feelings, to express the oppression and distortion of life to people. Modern writers also ask readers not only to be tolerant, but also to accept discomfort, and how to turn that discomfort into a more comfortable feeling. They direct their readers in unpleasant art, and they do not seek to please their readers, but to wake them up from their romantic dreams to face the real situation and see what they really are.
Modernity literature has the characteristics of anti-rationalism and irrationalism. On the one hand, modern writers understand things by opposing reason and advocate a kind of intuition and using unorthodox characters. On the other hand, modern writers pay attention to show the phenomenon of human alienation and dehumanization to readers through their works. Based on these aspects, the writers actually want to reflect the display and the society, to attack the society from the perspective of the individual and the perspective of the outsider, to give people a vague impression and at the same time to deny the society. For example, in “The Waste Land”, the representative work of the later symbolist writer T. S. Eliot, he created a decadent world with spiritual exhaustion and broken civilization, which showed the emotion and inner disorder of a generation. In “Burial of the Dead” sentences like ‘Only there is shadow under this red rock, (Come in under the shadow of this red rock)' and 'Oh keep the Dog far hence, that's friend to men, Or with his nails he'll dig it up again! You! hypocrite lecteur! - mon semblable, - mon frère!’, through a series of images, Eliot reduced the western world to a 'wasteland', showing its lifeless symbolic significance. On the one hand, through image superposition and symbolism, the author expresses the inner abstract emotional experience and wants to convey to the readers that the world is indifferent to human beings and life is meaningless and boring. The author shows the readers the true state of a world without divinity, in which western civilization has fallen into total depravity and darkness pervades the world. On the other hand, he tried to wake up readers from the romantic dream to know the real self and admit the real situation in their lives. People and things in the real world are cruel. When you brave to face your life, you can survive in such an indifferent world.
Modern writers focus on using alienation to describe society as absurd, hostile and uncontrollable. The world is so full of thorns that one can hardly move. In most of the works, the relationship between people has become increasingly estranged, and people become indifferent and hostile. In Yeats's “Sailing to Byzantium”, for example, an aging man finds himself in an unreal world. A sentence like ‘Monuments of its own magnificence; And therefore I have sailed the seas and come to the holy city of Byzantium’, it shows that the old man is disgusted with his dying body, and also implies that he will leave this earth and go to the holy heaven. It also shows the reader the ancient pain and the longing for eternal life. And in his other work “An Irish Airman Foresees His Death”, it shows the world is indifferent and even though people know what will happen in the future but they can do nothing to it just like the airman cannot do anything to his foreseeing death.
From another modernity writer Margaret Atwood's work “Oryx and Crake”, a character snowman has a real internal conflict. He has changed his name from Jimmy as a child to a snowman, who cannot get rid of the memories, but he wanted to. Crake tried to kill everyone with a virus and created a new species “Crakers” to show the indifference of him.
Another work of Cormac McCarthy “No Country For Old Men” also shows readers the indifference and brutality of the world. Chigurh and Crake are doing the same thing. They both speak for the universe and do not care about people's death anymore. Both are indifferent and they think there is no difference between humans and other species. Based on the above, modern writers want to persuade readers to face their reality and accept the truth of our situation by describing the real world ruthlessly, like McCarthy said “You should admit your situation.
There would be more dignity in it.” Martin Amis's work “Night Train” also shows that the modern writer's work is not designed to please readers, but to warn them how to face the world's unkindness and accept reality. The author has no answer as to why Jennifer committed suicide. Suicide is a difficult thing to understand for a woman who doesn't have any unhappiness in her life. Through this nihilistic hypothesis, the author wants to remind people to stay away from the poison of the merciless and indifferent world, face life correctly and find the value of life again.
In short, the relationship between modernist writers and readers is close and warm and does not hurt the fragile human beings like the indifference of the world to people. The purposes of the modern writers are not intended to please the readers, not to make them like their works, not to praise them, but to warn human beings to face their own life and acknowledge their current situation.