Readers who seek insight into the meaning of Thanksgiving can find a generous serving of literary criticism on the topic in the digital pages of文学批评在线。也许并不奇怪，作者们在节日发现在美国民族性格的家庭功能障碍探索和沉思了卓有成效的设置。
对于许多人来说，假期必定会激起童年的回忆。杜鲁门Capote-其短小说的职业生涯中短篇小说批评的处理，第47卷—had a follow-up of sorts to his more famous “A Christmas Memory” with the story “The Thanksgiving Visitor.” In it, the young protagonist, Buddy, is subjected to vicious bullying at the hands of a poor acquaintance, Odd Henderson. Buddy is distraught when he learns that his older cousin, Miss Sook, has invited Odd to her annual Thanksgiving celebration, which, as Capote describes it, is a Southern feast featuring “an ample number of stuffed turkeys” ; “perfect ambrosia, transparent orange slices combined with freshly ground coconut”; “a dish of whipped sweet potatoes and raisins”; “a delicious array of vegetables canned during the summer”; and “a cold banana pudding—a guarded recipe of the ancient aunt who, despite her longevity, was still domestically energetic.” When the day comes, Buddy, hiding in a cupboard, spies Odd stealing a prized cameo, and he decides to humiliate his enemy by announcing the theft in front of the whole family. Miss Sook covers for the boy and later admonishes Buddy that “deliberate cruelty” is the “one unpardonable sin.” In SSC, Volume 47, Kenneth T. Reed notes that Miss Sook’s words “have far reaching implications in Capote’s system of values because they clarify some of the perplexities of evil and its origins that occur in the pages of In Cold Blood,” in which the murderers are “prisoners of their pathological childhood” whose crimes “are rendered understandable, but not forgivable.”
感恩节晚餐聚会的许多潜在的陷阱，与亲人不愉快的政治讨论的前景是其中最麻烦的，并且只在总统大选年放大。在当代文学批评，卷277，布赖恩·达菲提供理查德·福特的2006年小说的深入分析土地的莱, which is set during Thanksgiving in the year 2000, when the outcome of the contested Bush-Gore presidential election was still uncertain. Duffy writes that “whatever the influence of the Florida stand-off on Ford’s decision about the year in which to set his novel, in setting it in 2000 he found a perfect backdrop to explore divisions in American society.” The novel’s protagonist, Frank Bascombe—who previously appeared in Ford’s novels The Sportswriter and Independence Day—has had a run of bad luck. He’s being treated for prostate cancer and his wife has left him. As Frank organizes a “damage control” Thanksgiving, he is forced to navigate the politics of his broken family. Duffy notes that in the novel “political division is merely the topical expression of a more widespread fragmentation of American society into individual and group identities. The phenomenon of disconnectedness begins in the family unit itself.”
The narrator of Philip Roth’s 1997 novel American Pastoral offers a different view, a farcically optimistic interpretation of the holiday, one that Michael Wood in CLC, Volume 119, calls “Thanksgiving as a form of ethnic truce”:
...当人人都有吃同样的东西，没有人偷偷跑去吃有趣的东西，没有库格尔，没有鱼丸，没有苦菜，只是一个巨大的火鸡2.5亿人一个巨大的火鸡饲料全部。在有趣的食物和有趣的方式和宗教排他性的延期，对犹太人，基督暂停和基督徒的受难三千年历史的怀旧暂停，当大家都在新泽西州和其他地方可以更理性他们的非理性比他们一年中的其余部分。在所有的委屈和怨恨，而不是只为Dwyers和Levovs但在美国，大家谁是可疑的其他人的禁令。这是美式田园出类拔萃且持续时间24小时。
Whether your Thanksgiving gathering is an occasion for moral instruction, reflections on family, or even a fleeting embrace of cultural homogeneity, here’s to a happy one. And bring a book to retreat to, in case the political discussion gets too hot.
控制你的饥饿感识字感恩通过请求从试用你的今天受过教育的销售顾问！