An Analysis Of The Spatial Form In The Known World

Edward P. Jones’s The Known World (2003), once published, wins almost all the major American literary awards, including the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize for fiction. The novel is known as much for its fresh theme as its innovative narratives. Jones presents the spatial features of the novel by fully using juxtaposition and reflexive reference. The juxtaposition in the text breaks the time flow, makes everything visual and simultaneous, and defamiliarizes the reading process; thus, readers have to reread the novel through reflexive references, connecting the disparate elements, apprehending them at a moment, and recreating a new whole in their perceptions.Combined with Joseph Frank’s theory of spatial form and the conceptions of juxtaposition and reflexive reference, this thesis focuses on the spatial form in the novel from three aspects——the physical space of the story, the textual space of the narrative and the perceptional space of the reader. The thesis first analyzes the physical space of the story to show its active effect on the novel’s themes by focusing, respectively, on three disparate but related spaces:Henry Townsend’s plantation, the road where Alice wanders and the hotel in Washington. Then it moves on to the textual space of the narrative and demonstrates that juxtaposition disturbs the traditional linear narrative and puts seemly separated but interrelated things together to achieve an effect of spatialization. Finally, it tries to clarify the perceptional space of the reader and explain how to approach The Known World spatially through reflexive references in the rereading process. By rereadbg the novel, readers are forced to remember the scattered but related fragments and fuse them together reflexively, changing their traditional reading habit into a spatial one and becoming more positive and active readers.Different from other studies on the novel, this paper, via illustrations from close reading, seeks to explicate Jones’s innovative spatial techniques and their relationship with the dramatization of the thematic concerns in the novel, arguing that the novel can be a spatial one and the exploration of spatial forms presents the interrelationship among those forms and offers new visions of the novel.