A Study Of Narrative Point Of View In The Temple Of My Familiar

Alice Walker, a talented and distinguishable contemporary African-American writer, always creates strong women characters in her works that focus on their struggle towards self-realization. Her modern epic novel published in the year 1989, The Temple of My Familiar, fully displays her writing technique, especially the narrative strategy in terms of narrative point of view. This thesis, on the basis of the theory of narrative point of view in narratology, is an attempt to show the characteristics of narrative perspective of The Temple of My Familiar by analyzing multiple narrative voices, embedded point of view and shift of narrative perspective. Firstly, the varied narrative voices in the novel contradict with each other and constitute dialogism accordingly. As a result, the denouncing voices against racism and the oppression by the white is weakened though the author enables the black people to make their own voices from different points of view. Secondly, the author employs some points of view embedded in others, which helps to form the authenticity of the stories, splice multifarious story fragments freely and naturally, and control the narrative tempo and rhyme efficiently. Thirdly, the constant shifts of narrative point of view in the novel help to break through the time and spaces of stories spanning a long period, form a montage effect in connecting the past, the present and the future of the black people, and intensify suspense created in the novel.