On Polyphony Of And The Mountains Echoed

Khaled Hosseini is an Afghan-born American novelist whose fame has grown rapidly in best-selling field in recent years. Scholars from home and abroad gradually pay more attention to Hosseini and his works due to his multicultural identity, the themes of nostalgia, redemption, initiation and the Humanitarian concern in his work. His latest work And The Mountains Echoed is a polyphonic novel which refers to the background of wars occurring in Afghanistan telling by different characters about the change of poverty, dislocation, exile and the affection of relatives and lovers as well as the change of life and death. The shifting of the perspective of narration reveals the hidden secret of characters, forming several separate stories which has inner dialogue with each other to interweave the multivoicedness. Hosseini deeply buries the misery history of an exile nation in the intervals and vacancies of various narrations. The subtle characters’relationship and romantic entanglement interweave in narrative voices with exquisite descriptions and make up extraordinary dialogue relations. The clever combination of structure and themes enhance the value of it as being read durably.This thesis includes five chapters. The introduction was the brief background of Khaled Hosseini and his latest work And the Mountains Echoed, the literature review on this novel, related polyphonic theories of Bakhtin and the significance of this thesis. Chapter two discusses the independent consciousness of this novel by analyzing the authorial position, intertextuality and the unfinalizability. It can be indicated that independent consciousness of characters is embodied in the text.The third chapter mainly researches the dialogue features of the novel. Great dialogue and micro-dialogue are the two forms of dialogue to support the multivoicedness of polyphonic novel. Details are discussed among the great dialogue appearing among the author, narrator and reader, as well as the micro-dialogue in the monologue. The fourth chapter is the combination of polyphonic philosophy and cultural meanings of this novel. It deeply analyzes the polyphonic theory of "other and self". The chapter presents how others affects the cultural identity of characters, how multivoicedness reflects the human emotion and how the dialogical relationship helps to shape the dilemma of morality. The conclusion of this thesis indicates that And the Mountains Echoed is a polyphonic novel with multiple polyphonic features which makes it more vividly presenting its cultural pursuit. And it draws a positive statement on the polyphonic theory in constructing the contemporary novel.