The Amazing Adventures Of Kavalier And Clay As An Unnatural Narrative

Michael Chabon(1963—),one of the bestselling contemporary American Jewish writers,is considered to be “the successor to J.D.Salinger.” In 2000,he published his third novel,The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay,which won him the Pulitzer Prize,making him the youngest winner of the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in the past 30 years.With numerous characters and dramatic plot built against the background of the Holocaust,it depicts a Jewish boy’s odyssey—escaping from Prague to America where he and his cousin start a comic business which wins them fame and wealth,but he still lives in the shadow of losing all of his family members.Chabon,who develops his own way of depicting the Holocaust,adopts the strategy of unnatural narrative in order to build up the unnatural Jewish images and Jewish space,which reflects the painful experiences of Jewish people who are forced to exile after the Holocaust.This thesis analyzes Chabon’s unique holocaust writing through Jan Alber’s unnatural narrative in three aspects: characters,spaces and narrative strategies respectively.These extremely defamiliarized characters who bear conspicuous unnatural color,such as the Golem in transformation,the Escapist and the Luna Moth are displaced in the peculiar Jewish space,which includes the closed escapist space,the alienated urban space and the room out of time.Furthermore,Chabon’s unique Americanization of the Holocaust narrative is reflected through the mode of “prolepsis in deep time” and the telepathic narrator,through which the main characters’ state of mind after the Holocaust is presented.Moreover,as one of the most representative among the third-generation Jewish American novelists,Chabon reviews and senses the history through looking back at the past,and builds a successive connection between American Jewish literature and the Holocaust in Europe,and Jewish diaspora in ancient history.Thereupon,this study deeply explores Michael Chabon’s particular concern with the neglected individual and the marginalized other through the unnatural narrative,providing readers with a broader and more comprehensive picture of the exile of individuals after the Holocaust,which helps readers understand Chabon and expands the researches on Michael Chabon to some extent,which seems to speed up and further the study of Jewish American literature in China.