On The Polyphonic Features Of Disappearance

Guyana was the first country in the Caribbean to establish diplomatic relations with China.People of Chinese descent form one of the six major ethnicities of Guyana.Disappearanceis a novel written by David Dabydeen,the Guyanese ambassador to China.This diplomat is also a novelist,poet and critic,who studied English literature at Cambridge University and received his doctoral degree from University College London.He has published seven novels and three collections of poems,garnering him awards such as the Quiller-Couch Prize from Cambridge and the Commonwealth Prize,a prize of equal importance to the Nobel Prize for Literature in the Caribbean.As a prolific novelist who has been writing for many years.Dabydeen finished Disappearance,one of his greatest works in the 1990s.In this novel,David Dabydeen shows his unique writing technique,which is repeated in various ways in many of his later works.Therefore,the cognition of the polyphonic pattern will not only enable readers to understand David Dabydeen's Disappearance,but will also exert a positive effect upon the study of the structures of Dabydeen's novels,attracting more Chinese scholars to examine his works and strengthen cultural and artistic communication between China and Guyana,thus creating cultural conditions for China's overall cooperation with Latin America.Using David Dabydeen's Disappearance as the focus and Bakhtin's theory of polyphonic novel put forward in Dostoevsky's Poetic Problems as the theoretical basis,the paper mainly analyzes the new authorial position and protagonist's self-consciousness reflected in the novel.Meanwhile,the paper also explores in depth the great dialogue,especially those expressed in the structure of the novel and relationships between the protagonists,the polyphonic micro-dialogue in the protagonist's discourses and inner monologues and the social problems reflected in micro-dialogue.Finally,the thesis concludes that Disappearance bears the typical characteristics of the polyphonic novel,and that these features endow the text with qualities of pluralism,openness and conversationalism.