| In her 1987 novel Beloved, Toni Morrison successfully reconstructs a history of black people through black culture and folk tales, and brings to life the horrible experience of slavery as a concrete historical account. Unlike previous black literary work tinted with heavy black masculinity, Morrison explores vividly the historicity of those unspeakable thoughts concealed in Afro-American's, particularly black women's mentality, which in turn makes this novel not only a novel of historicity, but also a remarkable fictional recount of black women's life under the system of slavery. That's why the novel itself has evoked much of theoretic contemplations and encourages informed critics to approach the novel from various critical perspectives, such as psychoanalysis, feminism, postmodernism, postcolonialism, all of which have immeasurably deepened our understanding of the novel in all its multi-sentient palpability.However, neither those contemporary commentaries intend nor are they capable of exploring the entire academic and cultural concerns indicated above; therefore, many aspects of this novel are still open for further exploration. One of the most striking aspects is that the author's skillful combination of the characters'discourse with their interlocking and interactive relationships contributes to the"heteroglossic"story telling in place of discredited"grand narrative"by the narrator. This distinctive feature has helped the novel's characters to present events through their dialogic interactions in the novel; as a result, the authorial intonation in the novel's narrative is reduced to the minimum but necessary level. In addition, the presentation of the plot in Beloved are discontinued by many interruptions, which, to a certain extent, may engender a sense of disconnectedness and fragmentation; however, the intrinsic connection between the novel's temporal and spatial relations does ensure an artistic entity of the novel's structure, which in turn helps the events in the novel to be clearly presented and highly linked to one another. Consequently, this striking aspect greatly distinguishes this novel from the traditional paragons of fictional writing, and the following thesis will try to explore into this aspect by drawing upon the theoretical concepts proposed by Russian scholar Mikhail Mikhailovich Bakhtin, in an attempt to deepen the reader's understanding of this epic work. To better account those features, the early part of the thesis will make an introduction on Bakhtinian double-voiced discourse and its theoretical basis metalinguistics, the concepts of polyphony and chronotope. Then, the third chapter will employ those concepts and analyze the polyphonic features of Beloved in terms of the new authorial position, independent consciousness and hero's unfinalizability in the novel. Then it will dwell on the novel's double-voiced discourse, micro-dialogue as well as the dialogic chronotopes respectively. Finally, the thesis comes to the conclusion that Beloved is a novel with profuse polyphonic features and a unique chronotopic structure. |
