Identity Construction Against Nihilism In Netherland

Netherland is a critically acclaimed work created by the contemporary American writer Joseph O’Neill, who has spent almost seven years on it. In Netherland, Joseph O’Neill uses cricket as a linking tie, depicting the journey of the two protagonists’ quest and struggle for identity and their efforts to reconstruct order in life in the United States. With the advantage of his own transcultural experience, Joseph O’Neill succeeds in presenting the difficult and marginalized situation of immigrants in America, and explores the ethnic relations in America within the context of multiculturalism.Though Joseph O’Neill takes the 9/11 event as an important element in the development of the novel, he does not confine this novel within the 9/11 fiction.Instead, O’Neill develops the story within the grand nihilistic background of the modern world, and sketches immigrants’ reflection upon their identity and the social reality. This thesis intends to make a general analysis of the characteristics of the nihilistic society depicted in the novel at first, and then probe into the identity problem from the perspective of identity theory and memory theory. Through a detailed exploration of the two protagonists’ efforts to construct identity and order within the nihilistic landscape, the thesis tries to analyze the functions of family and cricket in resisting nihilism and reconstructing order in the post 9/11 world.Joseph O’Neill suggests in Netherland that family plays a significant role in individual’s struggle to fight against nihilism and reconstruct order in life. Meanwhile,he endows cricket with symbolic meaning, trying to establish cricket as a new value and a form of resistance to nihilism, and uses the moral underpinnings involved in cricket to reflect upon the ethnic relations within the context of American cultural hegemony. Though the doomed fate of cricket plan implies that it is of great difficulty to realize genuine equality in ethnic relations, it does provide some inspiration for the development of ethnic relations within the context of multiculturalism.