Toni Morrison's Rhetorical Narrative Study Of Home

Home,the novel of Toni Morrison,takes the Korean War in the 1950 s as the background and relates the unfortunate experiences and the miserable fates of the black people in America.What's more,the novel reveals that,in the white-dominant American society,the black people undergo racial discrimination and inequality which pose considerable threat and profound influence on both the soul and the body of the blacks.This thesis takes Toni Morrison's Home as the research text,trying to apply James Phelan's rhetoric narrative theory to analyze the narrative techniques in Home on the basis of close reading.Firstly,the thesis applies the �view of three dimension character� as the cutting perspective to explore the characters' �mimetic�,�thematic� and �synthetic� qualities.The exploratory studies and analysis of these qualities provides theoretical supports in the understanding and analysis of the development of narrative progression and the characters from different aspects.Secondly,via �view of four dimension reader�,the thesis studies four kinds of readers' interpretation of the novel and the rhetorical effects produced by the narrative techniques.Finally,by focusing on the interaction between the author,the text and the reader,this thesis attempts to explore the �instabilities� and �tensions� to further illustrate the narrative process of the novel.Through analyzing the �view of character�,the �view of reader� and the �narrative process�,the author of this thesis attempts to reveal the interaction between the author,the text and the reader.The purpose of the thesis is to explain how Morrison shows �narrative progress� from the perspective of rhetorical narratology to the readers,which can provide a new perspective for the research of the novel.