Polyphonic Features In Toni Morrison's God Help The Child

Toni Morrison's latest novel God Help the Child(2015)narrates a story about how Bride,a blue-black skinned girl,struggles to free herself from childhood trauma and turns into a successful career woman in contemporary American societySince its publication,God Help the Child has won attention of scholars abroad and at home.Their studies concentrate on the exploration of childhood trauma,the remedial function of utterance,family relationship,subjectivity construction,Jazz-like musical aesthetics,the influence of racism and colorism on African Americans and the like.Considering the fact that so far few researches have been done on the novelistic form,this thesis studies the polyphonic features of God Help the Child based on Bakhtin's theory on polyphonic novel.Proposed by Russian literary critic Bakhtin,polyphonic novel refers to a kind of novelistic genre in which because of the absence of authorial domination,the protagonists are set free to have their own voices and independent consciousnesses and these consciousnesses,with equal value,co-exist,communicate and interact with one another.In God Help the Child,every character is endowed with his/her own voice to speak out his/her thoughts and feelings.Based on Bakhtin's theory on polyphonic novel,the thesis argues that God Help the Child shines a polyphonic feature in terms of the new authorial position,multi-voices,great dialogues,micro dialogues and unfinalization.Correspondingly,these polyphonic features bear specific social and cultural significance:revealing the importance of utterance and dialogue as effective ways of healing traumas and defining oneself;implying the necessity of introspection;highlighting the theme of universality about childhood trauma and love beyond the boundary of race,age,gender and class;indicating the transformation of African Americans'self identity toward a cosmopolitan citizen;endowing the novel with the function of a cultural metaphor as patchwork quilting which emphasizes pluralism and inclusiveness;and more importantly,preserving and developing the African oral tradition of story-telling.With polyphonic form,Morrison tactfully sheds light on the social and cultural contents of the novel.Her integration of literary writing with practical concern endows the novel with good artistic value as well as far-reaching significance.