Dialogicality Of Toni Morrison's Beloved On Bakhtin's Narrative Theory

Toni Morrison is a prominent black writer.She was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1993,and became the first black writer and the second American woman writer to enjoy the honor.Her fifth novel Beloved is her representative work.In Beloved,Morrison depicts the life of ex-slave African Americans in the 1870s.She describes vividly the inhuman treatment the blacks has suffered under slavery and profoundly exposes the destruction of black cultural identity and the black people's identities.The special narrative techniques of the novel have attracted people's interests.This present thesis is an attempt to make a tentative analysis of Beloved from three aspects:subject of dialogue,form of dialogue and spirit of dialogue according to Bakhtin's narrative theory. In Chapter One,the present thesis mainly analyzes the conflicts between the black and the white characters and between the African culture and the white culture in terms of Bakhtin's dialogue theory.The dialogue theory provides a way for the characters in Beloved to claim their identities.Morrison uses the dialogicality between western literary traditions and African-American traditions to preserve the cultural identity of the black slaves.In Chapter Two,the present thesis makes a detailed analysis of the novel from the form of dialogue—structure and style.It embodies in three aspects:synchronic art,the open ending and blurry genre.The present thesis will analyze the narrative technique employed in this novel according to Bakhtin's chronotope theory,polyphony theory and speech genre theory. In Chapter Three,the present thesis probes into the spirit of dialogue.The equality is the central idea of spirit of dialogue.It is through Bakhtin's intertextuality and carnival narrative that the equal dialogue is realized.Morrison shares something in common with Bakhtin in thoughts and literary arts.In Beloved,the delicate narrative strategies are used to deepen the theme of the novel and realize the dialogical relationship.Beloved is a unique narrative novel and is regarded as a best exemplification of Bakhtin's narrative theory.As a modern classical work,Beloved is a deserved masterpiece both in form and thought.