In Search Of The Survival And Wholeness: Cultural Memory Approach To Toni Morrison’s A Mercy

As the first African-American writer to win the Nobel Prize for Literature,Toni Morrison has been receiving much attention from scholars.In 2008,after Barack Obama was elected to be the first African-American president in the history of the United States,Morrison published her ninth novel A Mercy.It is the first time for Morrison to turn her writing background into the early North American colonial era.And it is also the first time for Morrison to narrate the Native Americans’ life in her fiction.Therefore,the novel wins the great acclaim after it is published,and then it holds the position on the best-seller list.Many a scholar at home and abroad has done a lot of studies on A Mercy.The researches mainly focus on structural study as text genre and narrative strategies or thematic study,which includes feminism,black culture,enslavement and seeking identity and so on.However,few scholars have made specialized researches on memory in A Mercy.Therefore,to compensate for the limitation,this thesis attempts to use the theory of cultural memory to do a relatively comprehensive study of the work,exploring Morrison’s writing intention.With the reference to Jan Assmann’s cultural memory theory,this paper mainly analyzes the media of cultural memory,the causes of cultural amnesia in A Mercy and how the characters use memory to reconstruct their personal identities.On the basis of rebuilding their personal identities,Morrison applies Jacob’s farm as a blueprint to explore the possibility of realizing the multi-ethnic harmony and the survival and wholeness of a country.Through the analysis,this thesis concludes that A Mercy profoundly embodies Morrison’s thought and her view of history.Initially,Morrison only focuses on the survival of African-American individuals.Then,she turns her attention to the group of African-Americans who have played an important role in the history of the United States.And in A Mercy,Morrison finally focuses on how the multi-ethnic groups live in harmony and realize the survival and wholeness of a country.Morrison rewrites African-American history through cultural memory.In this way,she hopes to cure the trauma of Americans with memory,and let them face the past history.In the contemporary world,racial discrimination and oppression should become a thing of the past,so the harmony among multi-ethnic groups is the foundation of a country’s development.As a representative African-American woman writer,Morrison has focused on how to establish a harmonious new relationship among different races,which is helping for the realization of the survival and wholeness of a country.