An Analysis Of Cultural Identity Of Characters In And The Mountains Echoed From The Diasporic Perspective

As a representative immigrant writer,Khaled Hosseini is a very brilliant figure in the contemporary American ethnic literature,and his special exile and immigrant experience greatly influences his writing.Different languages,cultures,societies of the west and the east make for Hosseini's special identity characterized with hybridity which gives him a much broader view and unique perspective that usual writers don't have.Hosseini's latest work And the Mountains Echoed,the best-selling novel of 2013 in the United States which is written with more exquisite techniques than his first two novels,makes Hosseini one of the best novelists.Under a new perspective it focuses on the Afghan immigrants who have exiled in the war and shows their identity anxiety in a different cultural environment.Based on Homi Bhabha's hybridity theory and the related research achievements in national cultural identity,this paper,from the perspective of diaspora,by means of cultural identity criticism,combined with text reading and background research,interprets the cultural identity of the characters in And the Mountains Echoed in order to explore the reasons of identity anxiety of Afghan immigrants and the way of cultural identity construction.The study of the cultural identity is helpful to a profound understanding of identity confusions of characters as well as the complex mentality and perspective of contemporary diaspora literature.The paper is divided into six chapters.The first chapter is an introduction of Khaled Hosseini and his work And the Mountains Echoed.The second chapter introduces the research status at home and abroad and the research methods and significance of this paper.The third chapter introduces Homi Bhabha's theory of hybridity and Homi K.Bhabha's elaboration on globalization and national identity.The fourth and fifth chapter are the main part of the paper.The fourth chapter analyzes the causes of the cultural identity crisis in the work.As Afghan immigrants,because of the cultural identity and origin of Afghanistan,Nila finds it difficult to truly integrate into the mainstream culture in France and becomes an alien the other in a foreign country.While Idris becomes the other in the eyes of his fellow countryman because he has left Afghanistan for many years,and his habits and ways of thinking are very different from those of the local people in Afghanistan.In the plight of the embarrassing identity,Nila chooses a fixed single identity and Idris isn't willing to coordinate his two identities in contradiction,which lead to their deeper identity anxiety.The fifth chapter analyzes the way of cultural identity construction in the work.Facing the great differences between Afghan culture and American culture,little Pari,under the premise of adhering to the national culture,tries to reconcile her Afghan cultural identity and American cultural identity in the third space and construct her own multicultural and hybrid cultural identity.And Pari,in order to make up for the huge vacancy in her mind,actively retrieves her past memory,realizes the unification of the past identity and the present identity and constructs her cultural identity.The sixth chapter is the conclusion of this paper.In the context of globalization,the analysis of cultural identity and the belonging consciousness of cultural identity of the characters in Hosseini's work will help us to better understand the embarrassing status of the Afghan immigrants,explore their double or multiple cultural identity,and enhance the cultural exchanges between different ethnic groups and different regions.