A Slave Girl's Journey Of Pursuing Freedom

The Underground Railroad,the sixth fiction of Colson Whitehead who is an African American writer,has not only enjoyed the broadest attention and the highest compliments since its publication in 2016,but also won the National Book Award in 2016 and the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 2017.Whitehead,by telling the story of a black slave girl Cora's escape,employs various narrative strategies and unique language expressions to bring to light the darkness of American slavery and rebuild the history,which embodies contemporary intellectuals' reflection on freedom and the equality of human rights.The thesis applies narratological theories to explore narrative techniques,characters,stories exhibited from different perspectives and the history hidden behind the stories in The Underground Railroad in terms of narrative time,focalization and narrative discourse.It inclines to uncover Cora's tortuous course of pursuing freedom and the wretchedness imposed by slavery on individuals and even the whole black slave groups.To begin with,the thesis delves into how Whitehead describes slaves' lives in plantations and Cora's experiences in the escape through the non-chronology and unequal narrative time from the aspects of order,duration and frequency to disclose the misery the enslaved blacks suffer from and to manifest heroine's solid resolution and persistent spirit of seeking for freedom.Moreover,it evaluates major events presented from disparate perspectives through zero focalization,external focalization and internal focalization to expose the sinful slavery system.On top of that,it analyzes the inner workings of different characters from the aspects of narrated discourse,indirect narrated discourse and dramatic narrated discourse to debunk the ruthless ruin to human nature and the trauma to human beings resulted from slavery system.The Underground Railroad can be regarded as a sample of narrative techniques.The study of novel's narrative strategies is conducive to grasp the content of the story and the themes the novel denotes.Although slavery system has become a history,its potential influence on contemporary society is far from gone.In this sense,the criticism of slavery and the promotion of freedom and equality in the Underground Railroad are of great significance in the contemporary world.