On The Process Of Blacks' Self Construction In Toni Morrison's Beloved: A Narrative Psychological Interpretation

Toni Morrison's Beloved ranks the first among the novels of the past 25 years selected by the New York Times and is considered to be the most significant work for her to win the Nobel Prize for Literature. This novel has highly acclaimed by media and won countless complimentary remarks from readers. Many readers take great interest in reading it so that it becomes one of the most popular novels written by African American writers.Morrison believes that the best way to keep her novel popular for a long time is to leave an open end and an open topic in her novels for readers. By this way, she can keep free communication between her novels and readers and encourage readers to think about the contents from any possible perspectives.Morrison is a writer who is good at telling stories. She grew up in a black family and listened to many stories about black people told by her father and grandmother. She was moved by these stories and shocked by the black people's traumatic experience in slavery in American history. She notices that black people's situations are not much improved at present and racial prejudice still exists in society. She feels sympathetic with them and decides to write novels to encourage black people who are still haunted by traumas caused by slavery. Her writing purpose of Beloved is to ask black people to go out of the historical dark shadows and forget these traumas. She feels pressing to help black people build up their new self and self-confidence. Telling their traumas to others is the way of achieving that.Self is an important concept in psychology and has been a topic studied by psychologists for many years. Many psychologists have devoted their lives to finding a perfect answer, but they failed. Morrison has been trying to do this job in her novels. Her focus is on blacks'self construction. Many articles once tried to interpret the topic of self in Morrison's works, but they didn't discuss it from the psychological perspective. Therefore, this thesis intends to discuss blacks'self construction process in Morrison's Beloved from a view of narrative psychology. Moreover, this thesis is going to examine the narrative therapy used in this novel and summarize the functions of it in healing blacks'traumas in their mind.This thesis consists of three chapters. The first chapter introduces the psychological characters in Morrison's novels, including the influence of stream-of-consciousness novels on Morrison's writings, the focus of telling stories found in them and the embodiment of the narrative self of narrative psychology in Beloved.The second chapter analyzes black people's self loss in and after slavery. It also illustrates black slaves'self loss in Beloved to prove traumas caused by slavery are still left in black people's mind.The third chapter explains the concept of narrative therapy in narrative psychology and focuses exclusively on its functions in healing black people's traumas.The last part draws a conclusion that we can discuss the process of blacks'self construction in Toni Morrison's Beloved from a narrative psychological perspective and we can also say this novel plays an important role in healing black readers'psychological traumas.