Identity Pursuit By Enslaved Other

Toni Morrison is one of the most outstanding Afro-American female novelists in contemporary America as well as on the world literary stage. In her creations, Morrison penetrates deeply into the hearts of the black, speaking to the present about the painful past of her own people. In A Mercy, her latest book as well as her ninth one, she does not exclusively concentrate on the black's endless suffering and struggling, and instead, she further reveals the brutal slavery imposed upon the entire nation in the early colonial era, when the white, the native and the black fall into co-victims, staggering with their splitting identities.Since its publication, A Mercy has invited a series of commentaries from the present literary circle and the noted publish agencies. A number of critics explore Morrison's frequent themes in A Mercy and praise it as a continuum of her previous creations while many a critic focuses on the comparisons and contrasts among her former works and the newest one, remarking the latter an exquisite work as her departure from the previous achievements. Those praises and comments are extremely enlightening and revealing for a better appreciation of this new work; however, they lack some systematic and theoretical study. Therefore, enlightened by postcolonial criticism, the investigation of the main four characters'search for identity reveals that the white, the native and the black in the colonized America are dispossessed of their identities, and are fatefully enslaved in the permanent otherness.The present thesis consists of three parts, among which the main body is sub-divided into three chapters:The first part is an introduction to the present thesis, including a brief introduction to A Mercy, literature review, theoretical basis and structural layout of the present thesis, with emphasis on the significance and feasibility of application of post-colonialism in the study of the novel.The second part includes Chapter One, Chapter Two and Chapter Three. Chapter One explores the identity crisis in the main characters, and investigates their otherness and orphanhood in the colonial context. Chapter Two is a discussion on main characters'pursuit for identity rebuilding through claiming ownership on outside materials or surrounding individuals. Chapter Three analyzes characters'ultimate incomplete identity and the reasons for their eternal enslavement.The third part serves as a conclusion of the present thesis. In addition to a summary of the whole thesis, it restates the importance of post-colonial study on A Mercy and the contribution of this research.