An Interpretation Of Everything I Never Told You From Spatial Narrative Perspective

Celeste Ng was a Chinese American writer born after 1980.Her debut work Everything I Never Told You became Amazon Best Seller after it was published in 2014.This novel tells a tragic story of a Chinese American family who live in the 1970s' America,discovering the mystery of Lydia's death from different perspectives.This thesis takes spatial narrative as the theoretical framework to interpret Everything I Never Told You and Celeste Ng's thinking and exploration about identity crisis,interracial culture and family education.Gabriel Zoran's “Towards a Theory of Space in Narrative” formed the most complete and systematic spatial theory,dividing literary space into three levels vertically: the topographic level,the chronotopic level and the textual level.This paper discussed about Everything I Never Told You from these three levels based on Zoran's spatial theory.Firstly,the topographic level is made up of a series of places and objective characters,and it exists for itself without the outside world's control,being independent of the text.Celeste Ng describes Harvard University,Middlewood town,Louisa's apartment and Lees' home both directly and indirectly,and these descriptions convey characters' personalities in the novel,making them vivid and lively.Second,the Chronotopic level is dynamic and it is the intergration of time and space.James,Marilyn and Lydia experience different events in different time and different places,and these events lead to different changes of their characteristics and inner worlds.By presenting characters' different responses to life,Celeste Ng shows her thinking about issues like identity crisis and interracial culture.Finally,three features of the textual level are under discussion: the selectivity of language and its effects,the non-linearity of the text and the perspectival structure.Celeste Ng uses her exquisite writing as well as acute insight to tell the Lees' tragic life,making the story impressive and provoking.The non-linearity of the text mixes up history and reality,breaking the limitations of time and space,to create a complicated and broken narrative order,while indeed this kind of arrangement is very clever.The perspective of “here” and “there” highlights the novel's themes like identity recognition,interracial culture and family education.Under the combination of the topographic level,the chronotopic level and the textual level,the three-dimensional spatial structure of Everything I Never Told You is set up vertically.James' looking for identity recognition,Marilyn's pursuing dream and Lydia's tragic death become very profound and vivid under Celeste Ng's writing.As a Chinese American growing in a white-dominated society,Celeste Ng expresses her own deep thoughts and exploration about Chinese Americans' survival through the Lees' tragic story.Celeste Ng appeals to people to solve issues like interracial culture and feminism with a fairer and more inclusive attitude,and the importance of right family education can never be ignored.