On Polyphonic Art Of The Bluest Eye By Toni Morrison

Toni Morrison is one of the distinguished black female writers in modern American literature and an outstanding representative of African-American feminist literature. In1993, Morrison was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature due to her collective writing achievements, which also makes her the first black female writer ever won the honor. Her works, with a vigor of emotions and a sense of poetic, depicts profoundly the unique cultural tradition, history and real life of the Afro-Americans.In her debut The Bluest Eye, Morrison gives an in-depth characterization of the black people, especially black female children who survive the values imposed by the dominant white culture. The novel also invites a number of literary criticisms for its flexible use of various written techniques; its brilliant employment of diversify narrative perspectives and its reflection of the black people’s fate under the circumstance of racial oppression.The Bluest Eye has attracted much attention from literary critics since it was published in1970. But most of these studies mainly focus on the different themes and the cultures reflected in the novel, and there are few in-depth researches on the novel’s discourse, structure and the artistic features implied, thus leaving room for further interpretation. Therefore, this thesis, by employing Bakhtin’s polyphonic theory, tries to analyze the unique polyphonic narrative techniques, the relationship between the author and heroes as well as the polyphonic novelistic structure implied in the novel so as to point out its polyphonic features. This thesis will try to conduct the analysis in five chapters.The first chapter is the introduction, in which the writer will mainly introduce the life of Toni Morrison, her literary influence as well as the literature review on The Bluest Eye. This part also gives a brief description of the famous Russian literary theorist Bakhtin and his polyphonic theory, gives an overview of some of the literary terms involved in the analysis and proposes the thesis’s research focus and significance.Chapter two to four are the body part of this thesis, which pay attention to analyze the novel’s polyphonic features from Bakhtin’s polyphonic theory. Chapter two focuses on analyzing the novel’s discourse by utilizing Bakhtin’s polyphonic dialogical theory. In The Bluest Eye, the subjects, including the narrators and the heroes, have independent voices which are not intermingled with that of others. The different voices communicate, disagree and even argue with each other, forming a diversity of polyphonic voices. Besides, this part also discusses the great dialogues and micro dialogues in the novel. The chief topic of the third chapter is the relationship between the author and the heroes. In The Bluest Eye, the author and hero’s relationship is no long that of the subject and object, instead, the hero becomes a subject who can express his independent ideology. In this aspect, the hero turns out to be a narrator who exits equally as the omniscient narrator or the author. The fourth chapter probes into the two aspects of the shaping of characters and the structure to find out the unfinalizability of the novel.Chapter five is the conclusion which summarizes the above chapters and further reviews the novel’s polyphonic dialogues, the unique interrelation between the hero and author, its unfinalizable structure as well as the indeterminacy of the characters’ consciousness. In the end, it comes to the conclusion that The Bluest Eye is a wonderful novel with distinctive polyphonic artistic features.