Truth Of Black Experience: Magical Realistic Fabrication In Beloved

Toni Morrison, winner of Nobel Prize for literature in 1993, is an outstanding Afro-American woman novelist. With poetic language, ingenious use of myth and unconventional narrative structures, Morrison mainly explores the national history and spiritual pursuit of Afro-Americans to express their psychological trauma caused by racial oppression and to reflect the difficulties they face in trying to achieve a sense of identity in a society dominated by white cultural values.Her novel Beloved is often regarded as her representative work of magical realism. The work tells the return of a dead baby's spirit in the flesh and blood of a 20 years old woman to demand maternal love. By employing magical realistic techniques that break the boundary between fact and fabrication, Morrison reveals slavery's effect on the Afro-Americans'psyches and develops deep into their ambivalence, fearfulness and love in life.This thesis focuses on the magical realistic techniques and mythical narrative in the novel. It also tracks the Afro-Americans' spiritual pilgrimage to psychological reconstruction by transcending the black history. Relevant theories of magical realism, new historical criticism, and myth and archetypal criticism serve as the principal theoretical frameworks. The thesis falls into three chapters.Chapter one provides a guide to the transition and development of magical realism as well as its artistic characteristics. It also analyses the magical realism in Beloved, which is mainly reflected in the application of the ghost image and the description of Sethe's traumatic psychology. Chapter two explores the nightmarish black experience reflected in the novel and attempts to disclose the physical and psychological trauma caused by slavery. The slave characters are still traumatized by their nightmarish memories many years after their escapes from slavery. However, they are struggling hard to achieve self-reconstruction through mutual help and love.Chapter three focuses on the myth and archetypal narrative in Beloved and its historical significance. The black experience has some affinities with the story of Israel's struggle for freedom in the myth of Exodus. Also, as a black woman writer, Morrison has rooted her novel in the soil of African black myth, showing distinctive characteristics of black culture. In conclusion, by employing magical realism and mythical fabrication, Morrison retells the truth of black experience and foretells that only by confronting their past can the black people walk out of the shadows of slavery, reconstruct their psychology and expect a better future.