Sherwood Anderson’s “grotesque” characters in The Triumph of the Egg (1921) often express, in a half-muted way, their paralleled senses of entrapment within and alienation from American soil. Their torments can be seen as an index to the depth of Anderson’s investment in the theme of “America’s original sin”: the enslavement of Africans and the usurpation of the lands inhabited by indigenous peoples. In “Out of Nowhere into Nothing,” Walter Sayer, one of its main characters, relates that America “still belongs to a race who in their physical life are now dead.” In a letter addressed to Roger Sergel on 30 March 1938, Anderson writes about how Native Americans can “get into their bodies some kind of earth rhythm we miss.” “That Christopher Columbus was a cheat,” declares the narrator’s father in “The Egg.” “He talked of making an egg stand on its end. He talked, he did, and then he went and broke the end of the egg.” Walter Sayer sings “the river song of the young black warriors,” an old African song which “slavery had softened and colored with sadness.” The song suggests the complexity of Sayers’s desire since its lyrics imply his fancied cross-identification with black invaders and rapists. Anderson’s authorial impulse to “believe” in America, which William Faulkner reflects in his essay in 1953, finds one of its most poignant expressions in Rosalind Wescott’s “odd floating sensation” in “Out of Nowhere into Nothing.” Through this, the whole city of Chicago and Rosalind’s body leave the ground and ascend into the air, allowing, symbolically, the doomed descendants of “the conquering whites” to escape from the land owned by “the red men who are gone.”

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The purpose of this study is to construct an image of the father, focusing on fathers born in the 1960’s and 1970’s, as primary family wage earner and masculine caregiver, as well as to identify problems of men caused by their masculinity. Interviews were conducted with thirteen fathers born in the Shanxi Province, China. Results of this study clarified the following points: (1) The role of the father is to be “a lantern that shows the way” for his child. By calmly and objectively discussing the situation in modern Chinese society with his children, such as the use of social connections to boost one’s social status and the dual nature of society (both good and bad aspects, including corruption), the father is able to give his children an objective worldview. Parental roles are clearly divided such that the father provides general direction while the mother takes care of day-to-day matters in children’s lives. (2) As a rule, the greater the number of children, the greater the father’s awareness of his responsibility as primary wage earner. When large amounts of money are needed, such as for the wedding of the eldest son, many fathers borrow money from their relatives. Some fathers may turn to gambling or other means in order to earn additional money to cover living expenses. Thus, the construction of a system of support that involves men is urgently needed both to resolve the issues facing men and to improve the lives of women and children.

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[in Japanese]

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