Amy Tan's Narrative Patterns In The Joy Luck Club: A Study On The Complicated Conflict Between Chineseness And Americanness

The clash and reconciliation have always been the writing topics of the Chinese American writers living in two cultures,that is,in American mainstream culture and national marginal culture.The aim of the thesis is to analyze the complicated conflict between Chineseness and Americanness from narrative patterns in Amy Tan's The Joy Luck Club.The thesis consists of five chapters.Chapter 1 is the introduction part,it includes the brief introduction of Chinese American literature and Amy Tan's writing,the methodology used to analyze the conflict between Chineseness and Americanness and the contributions the thesis will make to the study on Amy Tan's works.Chapter2,3 and 4 are the analytical parts of the thesis.Chapter 2 analyzes the conflict between mothers and daughters from the first-person narrators' point of view.The negative evaluation on the daughters is not only from the first immigrant elders,but also from the daughters themselves.The overlapped employment of flee indirect speech as well as free direct speech enables the first-person narrators to reasonably use others' ideological and psychological point of view without risking the unreliability of intrusion into other characters' mind.Chapter 3 discusses the function of narrative time in analyzing the conflict between the two cultures;the first part focuses on the role objective time plays in revealing the contradiction between the two generations,the mothers' past experience spread according to objective time foreshadows the future misunderstanding between the mothers and daughters;the second part analyzes the employment and effect of psychological time;the third part discusses the sense of rhythm in time in the importance of analyzing the conflict between the two generations.Chapter 4 focused on the analysis of the conflict from narrative space;the first part employs the discourse power theory to analyze the conflict between the mothers and daughters in pursuing the discourse power;the second part reveals the misunderstanding behind silence,the loss of speech is the complete absence of voice,it is a unique active technique of the Chinese Americans to resist and overthrow the mainstream authority and hence rebirth;the third part discusses the function of fengshui and wuxing in Chinese culture in dealing with the conflict between the mothers and daughters.In chapter 5,the conclusion comes into being:the conflict between "Chineseness" and "Americanness" is caused by the two different social ideologies represented respectively by Chinese mothers and their Americanized daughters,the friction between mothers and daughters in fact is the conflict between advantaged culture and disadvantaged culture,is the collision between western culture and eastern culture.Such friction is the externalization of power relations between two different social groups ideologically.American advantaged values in the leading and dominating position are well shown on the completely Americanized daughters,which makes the mothers and daughters standing at the opposing places.