Identity Loss And Its Reconstruction

Toni Morrison is the first black female writer to win the Nobel Prize in Literature and one of the most widely studied contemporary American authors.So far,Morrison has published 11 novels.Her works have had a dramatic impact on the American literature and attracted considerable critical commentary.Home was published in 2012.It is Morrison's recent work.The novel is about two protagonists,Frank and his younger sister Cee.They got identity crisis,and identity reconstruction during their migration,escaping from home and returning home.Most of the blacks in Morrison's novel have suffered identity crisis.Due to long-term racial discrimination and political oppression from the mainstream society,and the changes of physical living spaces caused by forced migration or by people's running away from home,they gradually got confused about their self-identity and collective identity.However,they've never given up their rebellion of fate and have been making continuous efforts to rebuild their identities.This thesis applies the spatial narrative theories of Henri Lefebvre and Gabriel Zoran to explore African American's identity crisis and reconstruction from the perspectives of physical space,social space,textual space,and psychological space.The main body is composed of three chapters.Chapter one analyzes Frank and Cee's active or passive movement in the physical living space,as well as racial discrimination and political violence in the social space,to explore the manifestation of identity crisis of the two protagonists.Chapter two discusses about their efforts to quest identity by analyzing the discourse space constructed by the switch of narrative perspectives and the spatio-temporal shifts caused by flashback and repetitive narrative in textual space.Chapter three analyzes the reconstruction results of the protagonists'identity,including collective identity and self-identity,from the perspective of psychological space.Through the recognition of black culture,Frank and Cee reconstruct their collective identity as African American.On this basis,they reconstruct their self-identity by regain manhood and self-independence,respectively.Morrison's works are always focused on the identity dilemma of blacks.But unlike Morrison's past works,Home is endowed with a positive and optimistic spirit.The happy ending of this novel arouses people's thinking about the country,the collective and the individual.In the increasingly complicated social environment,only by adhering to the traditional culture of our own nation can we gain self-esteem and self-confidence.