Return Under The Guide Of Collective Memory

Linda Hogan is an outstanding Native American female writer in the Native American Literature Renaissance, whose works cover a variety of themes and forms and are full of Indian mysteries.People of the Whale, Linda Hogan’s latest novel,is mainly concerned about the issue of Native American identity crisis and reconstruction.Due to the specific history and traditional culture, Native Americans have been confronted with the issue of identity in the white-dominated American society. Thus the issue of identity has been the focus of thematic concerns in Native American literature.This thesis attempts to analyze the identity crisis and reconstruction of the protagonist Thomas in People of the Whale from the perspective of collective memory, emphasizing that collective memory has great influences on the reconstruction of Thomas’identity. The thesis consists of three chapters,apart from the Introduction and the Conclusion.The introductory part gives a brief introduction to Linda Hogan and her novel People of the Whale. Then a literature review on the author and this novel is followed. At last, the theoretic basis and the structure of this thesis are presented.Chapter One analyzes the great influences of collective memory on the formation of Thomas’previous identity. His collective memory of his family and tribe is the soil in which his special identity grows.Chapter Two explores Thomas’identity crisis from the perspective of collective memory. The close relationship between Thomas’oblivion in collective memory and his identity crisis are demonstrated here.First of all,two causes of Thomas’oblivion in collective memory are discussed. The first one is the Vietnam War and the second one is the assimilation policy. And then, this chapter analyzes how Thomas’oblivion in collective memory results in his identity crisis.On the one hand, Thomas’ oblivion in the collective memory makes him lost; on the other hand, although his oblivion in collective memory, Thomas can’t be assimilated by the white Americans easily.Chapter Three probes into the ways of reconstructing Thomas’ Native American identity through the retrieval of the collective memory. By returning to the natural world, recalling the collective memory of tribal stories, and reperforming the ceremonies and rituals,the collective memory of Thomas is retrieved and then his native identity is reconstructed finally.The Conclusion emphasizes the influences of collective memory on the construction and reconstruction of Thomas’identity, pointing out Linda Hogan’s intentions implied in People of the Whale. According to Linda Hogan, Native American collective memory has faded away under the white’s violent colonial domination,so it is very important to preserve and maintain Native American collective memory. In a large sense, only if people, including Native Americans and people in other nations as well, maintain and preserve the collective memory of their own history and traditional cultures in various ways can they keep their own characteristics and escape from total assimilation in the flood of globalization.