Spatial Narrative In Japanese-american Karen Tei Yamashita’s Tropic Of Orange

Karen Tei Yamashita（1951-）,professor of literature at the University of California,Santa Cruz,is one of the remarkable contemporary Japanese American writers.Her works have been nominated for the National Book Fiction Award several times and have won a series of awards and honors,such as the Jannet Hidinger Kafka Award for Fiction and the American Book Award.This thesis chooses her representative work,Tropic of Orange,as the research object.Taking the global society as background,this novel presents the life course of seven ethnic minority protagonists in their space-crossing journey,and reflects their predicaments concealed in the torrent of the times.Furthermore,Yamashita’s concern for minority groups is also conveyed in this novel.Based on spatial narrative theory,this thesis takes the spatial characteristics of the novel as the object of exploration.By examining the spaces narrated in the novel,the chronotope,and the spatial structure of the novel,this thesis investigates the special significance of the spatial characteristics for the theme interpretation.Thereby,this thesis intends to explicate that the novel reveals the tribulations of ethnic minority groups in the globalizing world through the writing of space.This thesis falls into five chapters.The first chapter introduces Karen Tei Yamashita and her Tropic of Orange,the current researches on Tropic of Orange at home and abroad,the spatial narrative theory,and briefly describes the significance and structure of this thesis.The second chapter selects three spaces narrated in the novel,namely house,city,and road for analysis,and expounds on their metaphorical functions in revealing ethnic minorities’ spiritual plights.The third chapter analyzes the chronotope in Tropic of Orange from compression of time,prominence of space,and interaction of time and space.In the interplay of time and space,the narrative of the novel presents spatial characteristics,and displays the stereoscopic chronotope of ethnic minorities’ life trajectory to the reader.In the fourth chapter,the spatial structures of the novel are discussed.Various spatial structures are presented in the novel,including orange-segment,circled,and boxed structure.The varied structures break the linear narrative and further highlight ethnic minorities’ predicament.At the same time,the unity of form and theme plays a crucial role in expressing the harsh situation and miserable fate of ethnic minorities.Chapter Five is the conclusion part summarizing the main findings of this thesis,also indicating the uniqueness and significance of the novel’s spatial writing toward ethnic minority groups.Analyzing Tropic of Orange from the perspective of spatial narrative,it can be seen that focusing on space,Yamashita’s unique narrative reveals the difficult survival of ethnic minorities in the era of globalization.Besides,Yamashita,a writer from the new generation of Japanese American literary world,jumps out of the single ethnic framework,pays attention to the difficulties of ethnic minorities in the contemporary world from the perspective of the whole ethnic group,and tries to arouse the world’s attention to them.The exploration of the thesis reflects Yamashita’s concern for the plight and wretched fate of ethnic minorities,and her reflection on minority groups’ existing circumstances in the era of globalization.