| Middlesex is a novel written by Jeffrey Eugenides,a Greek American writer.This novel was published in 2002 and won the Pulitzer Prize in 2003.It focuses on various themes of ethnics,classes,wars,history etc.Eugenides adopts the narrative style and narrative forms to expose the protagonist’s identity of “middlesex” in creation of this novel.The intersex identity of the protagonist draws lots of researchers’ attention to his dual cultural background and the trauma in his growth to explore Middlesex from the perspectives of intersex,ethnicity,ethnic identity,queer theory,post-colonialism and so on.But there are few scholars focusing on Cal’s cultural identity,especially the close relationship between narrative forms and cultural identity.Through the intensive reading of the text,this thesis finds that there is a close relationship between the narrative forms of this novel and its theme,“middlesex”.The arrangement of narrative forms in this novel exposes the multi-themes of “middlesex”,and it also reflects Cal’s special cultural identity with a balance between Greek and American culture during the second diaspora.Therefore,this thesis is to analyze the cultural identity of Cal from the perspective of narratology,along with Stuart Hall’s theory of diasporic cultural identity.This thesis is composed of five chapters.Chapter one is an introduction to the writer and the work as well as the theories of cultural identity and narratology,and has brief reviews on the studies about Middlesex both in China and abroad.Meanwhile,the significance of this research and the research questions are included in this chapter.The main body contains the following three chapters:Chapter two discusses the shifting between the first-person voice and the third-person voice,a presentation of Cal’s different sexual identities with different cultural features.The first-person voice presents the self-construction of Cal’s male identity,while the third-person voice reflects the disturbance and self-deconstruction from female identity towards this self-construction.The shifting of these two narrative voices explains Cal’s transformation with different cultural features represented by two different genders to search for his cultural identity of “middlesex”.Chapter three,with different types of narrative focalization,explores different cultural views of the members of the Stepanides family and shows how the background has a big impact on Cal and the formation of his cultural identity.Under the influences of these cultural views,Cal forms his compound id with the supportive Greek cultural background and the stimulant spirit of American dream.Chapter four argues that the arrangement of narrative order and narrative duration can reflect Cal’s cultural identity which presents a directional linear to modern American cultural background and cyclic returning to Greek tradition.With the alternating between analepses and prolepses,Eugenides obscures the border between modern American society and ancient Greek tradition to form a kind of cyclic regression.And with the different narrative duration,he manages to connect the characters into different historical background.All of these reveal a cultural tendency of finding a balance between the traditional civilization and modern society.This thesis draws a conclusion in chapter five through the argumentation of these three chapters and holds the point of view that the hermaphrodite Cal,as a character narrator in Middlesex,has the rights given by an implied author to arrange the narrative rhythm,narrative voice and narrative perspectives.Cal’s special gender,special growing-up experiences and special state in narration determine the possibility of his cross-cultural life,showing a desired balance between the agricultural civilization of ancient Greek and modern American culture.This novel is also a significant attempt of Eugenides who shows his humanistic concern to the marginalized people in modern society and his thinking of the living state of the multicultural groups. |
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