A Study Of Feminist Narratology Of "Grace"

A Mercy, Toni Morrison’ s ninth novel, tells the living conditions of different races.Although the novel was published in 2008, the story is set in early colonial period of the New Continent in the late 17 th century. This demonstrates the author’ s intention to reconstruct the history and her thinking about how different ethnic groups should live together.Employing the theory of Susan Sniader Lanser’ s Feminist Narratology, this thesis attempts to analyze A Mercy from narrative point of view and narrative voice. The main body of this thesis consists of three parts. The first part gives a brief introduction of Feminist Narratology and the related theory used in this thesis. The second part analyzes the narrative point of view of A Mercy through space and time point of view,psychological point of view and ideological point of view on the basis of Feminist Narratology. Different from Classical Narratology which focuses mainly on how the narrative point of view is reflected, Feminist Narratology is more concerned about the content conveyed through the narrative point of view. The analysis of the narrative point of view in A Mercy presents the ideology of narrators and characters. It also presents the process of establishing intimacy between readers and narrators. The third part analyzes different narrator’ s voice on the basis of the theory of narrative voice. Besides the traditional authorial and personal voice in the novel, Morrison also uses the relative new communal voice which enables the women at the edge position to form a group. The analysis of narrative voice in A Mercy reveals the importance of female voice to the construction of female identity. Through text analysis, this thesis aims to reveal Morrison’ s unique narrative authority outside the narrative discourse and her insight into society, history and humanity.