Fragmentation In Brian Castro's The Garden Book

Brian Castro is a well-known Chinese-Australian writer. His multi-cultural family background exerts an influence on his writing style. His novels are outstanding in bringing Chinese and Australian culture together and they have received wide critical acclaim and won a number of state and national prizes.Castro lives inside the mainstream society but outside its dominant culture, he is perplexed between the host culture and the ancestor culture, experiencing his divided self and aspiring after an intact identity. His displacement represents cultural uncertainty in the sense of postmodernism. So naturally, his novels also take on his Australian-Chinese cross-cultural complex.The Garden Book which was published in 2005 is his eighth novel. It has received widely affirmative remarks. Basing on the theories of postmodernism and R. D. Laing's researches of self-division, this thesis attempts to research and interpret fragmentation employed in the novel.Besides introduction and conclusion, this thesis consists of three chapters. In introduction part, there is a general survey of Brian Castro's life and his works, and particularly introduces the story of The Garden Book and its literary reviews from home and abroad which are valuable for this thesis's further study. In addition, it also introduces the theories of fragmentation and the divided self which are necessary for the following chapters'analysis, and the feasibility and significance of the employment of the theories in interpreting the novel. Fragments impenetrate in the novel's three aspects: narrative, characters and images, and this thesis probes into them respectively in three chapters. Chapter One is about the split narrative, reading it from fragmented language, instable perspective and incoherent plot. Chapter Two is about the divided personalities, using Laing's theory to interpret this novel's eccentric and fragmented characters. Chapter Three studies the fragmented images which are divided into two kinds, one is tangible or visibly broken images, and the other is intangible or invisibly fragmented images. Finally is the conclusion part. Based on the investigation above, the thesis concludes that the novel sufficiently gives voice to a fragmented world, and at the same time explores the existential perplexity of human beings, with an emphasis on the Chinese-Australians'adrift and rootless feelings and their sense of indeterminacy and fragmentation. It also gives light to the multi-cultural countries that to respect the existence of various cultures is not merely admitting their differences but also treating them equally. The mainstream culture should try to understand the marginal people and the minority race with a tolerant attitude instead of prejudice and discrimination.