The Features Of Dialogicality In The Text Of Morrison's Novels

This thesis applied Russian literary theorist Bakhtin's dialogical approach to interpret American black woman writer Toni Morrison's two major works, Beloved and Paradise. Bakhtin's dialogical theory accentuates every independent full valued voice. These different voices are singing in different ways on the same theme. They form a dialogical relationship of agreement and disagreement, supplementation and corroboration, question and answer. A dialogical novel has the following characteristics: first, the "I" and "you" author vis-à-vis hero position. Second, multivoicedness. Third, the openness, the unfinishedness and indeterminacy of the hero's personality. There are two specific forms of dialog in analyzing a literary text: great dialog and micro-dialog. The polyphonic internal structure unites the work under one major theme. There is a polyphonic internal structure between Beloved and Paradise. The two novels are united under the major theme of black experience. Beloved depicts the physical and spiritual process from a slave to a free person. Paradise describes the strenuous endeavors of the freed slaves to create a paradise of their own. Paradise forecasts that the blacks will discard their self-isolation and adopt a more healthy racial strategy to integrate with the outside world. These two works are monumental dash strokes on the one-hundred-year Afro-American people's historical scroll. Beloved has the characteristics of multivoicedness. In addition, Beloved has a historical dialog with the classic slave narratives. With her intense racial responsibility and gorgeous artistic imagination, Morrison evicts from her works the slightest trace of explanation and embarrassment to the possible readers. Beloved and the classic slave narrative form a relationship of supplementation and corroboration,question and answer. Paradise is about the dialog between a patriarchal society and a matriarchal society, between love and hate, between life and death. The dialog has to be settled in the most violent form of a war. However, this war transcends race and gender. The significance of the war here has a more universal meaning. The multi-layers of narrations by the multivoices present the reader a heteroglossia state of America in the 1960s: the collapse of traditional family moral standards, the violent racial conflicts, the senseless Vietnam War and the crisis of modern American people's spiritual world. In Beloved and Paradise, the characters often become the battleground of conflicting ideas. The conflicting self reflects the complexity and indeterminacy of human nature. Morrison creates a group of vivid black images. The images have a strong sense of "racial health" that is lacking in many previous writings, i.e. "a sense of complete, complex, undiminished" human beings(Gates, afterword 190). In this sense, Toni Morrison resounds with the progenitor of black woman writer Zora Neale Hurston. Morrison has a revolutionary and generative dialog with the black literary tradition. Morrison depicts all the depth of the human soul. She is a realist in a higher sense...