An Analysis Of Magic Realism In Maxine Hong Kingston's Tripmaster Monkey: His Fake Book

Maxine Hong Kingston is a highly acclaimed writer of both fiction and nonfiction of Chinese American author of the twentieth century who makes it to the top of the literary world in America. Tripmaster Monkey: His Fake Book was published in 1989 and it is regarded as one of her best-known works.The writer of the present thesis believes that the reason why Tripmaster Monkey achieves such extraordinary success and attracts so many readers all over the world lies in Kingston's unique artistic style of integrating classical Chinese literary works with the Latin American-rooted Magic Realism theory and absorbs the essence of the Western behavior manners.Through the employment of magic realism, Kingston deepens the novel's subject of reflecting the reality, searching Chinese American identities and causes impressive magic and aesthetic effects in the reader's mind by blurring the boundary between the past and the present, the real and the imaginary. Tripmaster Monkey has become one of the representative magic realistic works and Maxine Hong Kingston has also been called a woman writer of magic realism to compose "modern myth".The present thesis begins with the causes of the employment of magic realism by Kingston, a second-generation Chinese American writer, through analyzing the author's personal experiences and the novel's realistic themes, followed by an analysis of magic realism's origin, its definition, its evolution in the present America and its artistic characteristics. The thesis then focuses on the complete and skilful adoption of magic realism in Tripmaster Monkey and analyzes it from the three perspectives of characterization, narrative methods and writing techniques. Finally, the thesis concludes that Tripmaster Monkey is a great representative work of magic realism. The thesis aims not only to prove Tripmaster Monkey to be a magic realistic masterpiece through demonstrating various magic realistic elements in it, but also to produce a better understanding of the artistic techniques and profound themes of the novel from the angle of magic realism.