Death Narratives In American Minority Fiction

The study of American minority literature has so far developed into an outstanding academic field both at home and abroad.Wchat merits special attention is that although the research on literature of each ethnic group is more and more flourishing,the holistic concern on American minority literature is still kind of insufficient.Death narrative is a new academic term emerging from Chinese literary and art critics in the 21st century,which contains two levels of meaning:"story" death and "discourse" death.Death narrative not only plays a unique role in American minority writing,but also provides a new perspective for the overall study of American minority literature.This dissertation is focused on the death narrative(s)in American minority fiction,tending to analyse the significant death events or scenes in the works of African American writer Toni Morrison.Chinese American writer Fae Myenne Ng,Jewish American writer Philip Roth,Indian American writer Sherman Alexie and Hispanic American writer Junot Diaz.By doing so.this dissertation attempts to reveal the various narrative functions of death in the plot construction and theme expression in minority novels.Death narrative highlights the love theme in Morrison's novels.Love is the theme that Morrison stresses most in her literary creation.The theme of love is closely related to death narrative in Morrison's novels.Centered around the suicide of Robert Smith,Song of Solomon undertakes a political negotiation about love,that is,when dealing with the rancor and conflict with the white race,should the black race stick to the narrow nationalist love,or should they go beyond ethnic boundaries and advocate the broad humanitarian love?Beloved,in which the expression of love is mainly achieved through the infanticide plot and ghost writing,explores the distortion and variation of maternal love in the context of slavery.Death narrative in Ng's novels interweaves with cultural memories,reflecting the"identity desire" of the new generation of Chinese Americans who are eager to break away from their ethnic and cultural identity and actively integrate into the mainstream American society.Bones revolves closely around Ona's suicide by jumping off a building,while Steer Toward Rock intersperses the whole book with the death scenes concerning the major characters.Through death narrative(s),Ng's sharp criticism of the traditional culture of old China and the strong identity of the American nation are impressively demonstrated.Roth's writing after 1986 is growing more and more concerned about the aging problems of human beings.Correspondingly,love of life and anxiety over death become the core themes of Roth's writing in this period.Roth's writing often transcends the superficial ethnic experiences to convey universal philosophical thoughts on the whole human race.The Human Stain and Everyman obviously dilute the ethnic identities of their protagonists,and focus on the anxiety of the post-industrial human individual over death when approaching the end of life.There seems to be a suffocating crisis of old age behind each death mystery in The Human Stain,while Everyman existentially illustrates the process of human reconciliation with death through highly pictorial death scenes.As an American Indian writer,Alexie expresses concern about the current situation and the future of his ethnic group through a series of skillfully-designed death metaphors.Reservation Blues and Indian Killer record in detail the living conditions of Indian American young men either on the Indian reservation or in the metropolis,but both the Spokane Reservation in Reservation Blues and Seattle in Indian Killer are metaphorically transformed by Alexie into dead spaces of Indian Americans.In Flight and The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian,Alexie clearly shows such post-modern ethnic ideologies as transcending ethnic boundaries and realizing individual redemption,and positively explores the possible ways for Indians to survive the plight of death.Love stories in Diaz's works tell nothing but "dead" love,since the love that each protagonist of Diaz pursues for is doomed to wither before it fully blooms.Drown and This Is How You Lose Her are often treated as a long novel "packaged"into two collections of short stories.The stories in these two works are all associated with the Dominican American young man Junior,his brother Rafa and father Ramon Although nearly every single story in the two works involves a relationship between man and woman,the three male characters have never gained true love under the influence of the unique masculinity within Dominican culture.That Rafa,who plays a significant role in Junior's growth process,dies of illness symbolically indicates the writer's negative criticism of Dominican masculinity.The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao,with the love life of the Dominican American young man Oscar as the main story line,examines the fate of the marginalized people by setting it in the grand narrative of Dominican history.Oscar never gets rid of the fuku that haunts the whole family during his very brief life.Derived from European colonial invasion and formed in the dictatorial reign of Trujillo,the fuku of the Cabrals is in effect the epitome of the tragic fate of the entire Dominican nation.In the novel,it is precisely because of this eternal national fuku that the protagonist Oscar,an atypical "Dominican cat",yearns from childhood for the love flower which has never really blossomed.In a sense,Oscar's death not only helps build the narrative structure of the novel,but also reveals the identity dilemma and existential misery of Dominican Americans.In general.American minority writers as a whole have conveyed,to the greatest extent possible,their ethnic life experiences through death narrative,which is the most common feature of death narrative(s)in American minority novels.However,each minority writer as an independent creative subject should have maintained his/her own writing style."When it comes to death narrative,there must be a thousand death narrative strategies for a thousand minority writers,and a thousand death modes for a thousand minority novel characters.In short,at the level of "story" death,each death is different;at the level of "discourse" death,each conception has its own characteristics.The differences of death narrative strategies exactly reflect the nuances of writers in their ethnicity,personality,gender and narrative.This is also why each American minority writer is viewed uniquely magnetic,and each American minority novel found full of suspense and wonder.