The Quest Of Wholeness

Meridian is the second novel of Alice Walker, who is one of the most important black women writers in the contemporary American literature. In the novel, Walker depicts for us a vivid picture of a black woman's solitary struggle for the wholeness of herself and her people in and after the Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s and 1970s. The author intends to show us that one's quest of wholeness is inseparable from the wholeness of his/her race.This thesis tries to analyze the fragmented life of the protagonist Meridian from her three failed roles as a daughter, a mother, and a revolutionary. Before the movement, Meridian lives in a numb state without knowing her way out. As a daughter, she is guilted for having burdened her mother's life and she cannot love her mother. As a mother, she never loves her son, even thinks of killing him or herself. Awakened by the movement, she becomes aware of her condition and that of her black race. She thrives herself into the movement, striking for the rights of her people. However, as the movement was declared dead in the later 1960s, Meridian finds that she cannot kill for the revolution. So Meridian fails as a revolutionary. Burdened by the senses of guilt from the three failed roles, Meridian lives in a split state, symbolized by a series of symptoms in her body, which almost leads to her death. To retain her state of wholeness, she chooses to go back to the South, to live with her people, which is her source of strength. Still a civil rights worker, Meridian reaches her wholeness through the ways of broadening the definition of mother in the help of others' children, of discovering the black tradition from the black music and black church, and of inheriting her maternal heritage of creativity and ecstasy. Later Meridian could define her role as an artist in carrying on the black culture and she passes on her quest of wholeness to others around her.What's more, Walker also applies the traditional black quilting technique in her novel by selecting the critical moments in Meridian's life to intensify our author's quest of wholeness in her writing.Meridian is Walker's first important novel that embodies her idea of "survival whole". From this novel on, our author continued her quest of wholeness in her following novels, which reaches its peak with the great success of the novel The Color Purple.