The Interpretation Of Defamiliarization In To Kill A Mockingbird

To Kill a Mockingbird, as the only one novel of Harper Lee who is the contemporary American southern woman writer, employs a little white girl’s perspective to narrate what happened in Maycomb, a little southern town. The unique narrative techniques of this novel win a place for its author and realize its own literary value in American literature. Thus it is on wonder to see its recognition both from the academia and common readers, and such recognition provides the prerequisite for an analysis of the novel’s defamiliarization, which the thesis needs to probe into. Through defamiliarization is not an exotic concept for us now, it is still worthwhile studying. The first appearance of the term defamiliarization was in the article named "Art as Technique" written by Russian Formalist scholar Victor Shklovsky in 1917. However, after being developed almost a century, this theory does not fade away but is applied in literary criticism as a much more mature and comprehensive system. Many writers use all kinds of techniques to realize the defamiliarization of their works, to reflect their literariness, to prolong the cognition process of readers, and to enhance the aesthetic effect from the micro level as a word to the macro one as one text. In other words, defamiliarization is to distinguish literature from daily life, to reflect the singularity of the works, to achieve its literariness by applying a variety of narrative techniques. Therefore, after an overall close reading and in-depth analysis of this novel, this paper would present its defamiliarization from the text structure, focalization and language, and then discuss the significance and effects produced by its defamiliarization to the sublimation of themes and to the characterization.The unique embedded structure which is formed by the double plots in To Kill a Mockingbird both highlights Harper Lee’s consideration of human nature and touches the heavy theme of American southern blacks for the first time. The dual perspective composed by the experiencing self and narrating self runs through the whole text, and focuses on the adults’world and that of the children, in which the two corresponding discourses are interwoven tightly to form the polyphonic poetics. Besides, the interpretation of this aspect reveals the miserable condition of black people much more directly and promotes the heavy subject into a serious one. In terms of language, the light children’s style and the dull blacks’one in this novel uncover the existing problems and the historic trauma of American southern region in an indirect way. This part makes the theme of this novel realize its further sublimation and alienation, namely the residue and variation of slavery in current American south. From the structure to the perspective, and then to the language at last, the interpretation of defamiliarization in these three aspects does not only successfully serve the process in which the grand theme of black people and its history sublimates, but also breaks the deadlock in which the defamiliarization is used only as a technique for technique’s sake.