Chronotopic Identity In Felicia’s Journey And Brooklyn

William Trevor and Colm Tóibín are both renowned authors in the contemporary Irish literary world.Their works have gained popularity among readers at home and abroad.Both of Trevor’s Felicia’s Journey and Tóibín’s Brooklyn describes the story of an Irish girl who leaves hometown for another land.The experiences of the two protagonists,Felicia and Eilis,reveal their identity formation at home and the foreign land.Felicia achieves the faulty identity while Eilis gains the interactive identity.Based on the previous studies focusing on the characters and social contexts,this thesis attempts to discuss the identity issue through the perspective of Bakhtin’s chronotope.It lays emphasis on interpreting how the identities are formed and the change process via the scope of chronotopic identity.The first chapter expounds the two protagonists’ inchoate identities shaped in the Irish hometown.Through detailed textual analysis,home chronotopes are discussed as confinements that circumstance the protagonists.The oppressive contexts of home shapes Felicia’s vulnerable identity;Eilis’ problematic identity is molded by the parentalism and provincialism of the Irish home.Chapter two analyzes the protagonists’ different identities constituted in the foreign chronotopes.The city in the English Midlands shapes Felicia’s dissociative identity while Brooklyn molds Eilis into an associative identity.Chapter three illustrates the change process of their identities,analyzing the individual reasons accounting for the different outcomes of the identity formation.Felicia takes negative way of dealing with the changes and challenges on the new land.She indulges in the past and avoids the association with people,which leads to her faulty identity in the change process;Eilis adopts a positive way in handling the changes she faces.She resists the negative influences of the environs and keeps an open mind towards the time-space changes.By initiating learning to adapt to the new environment,Eilis acquires the interactive identity.