Cora's Growth In The Underground Railroad From The Spatial Narrative Perspective

Colson Whitehead is a well-known African-American writer in the United States.His The Underground Railroad won the National Book Award in November 2016 and got the Pulitzer Prizes in the following year.The novel told the story that Cora decided to escape from the southern plantation all the way to the North by taking the mysterious underground to pursue her freedom,after being abandoned by her mother and humiliated and raped for countless times in the southern plantation.The different changes of spaces in the novel promote the development of the story.Therefore,the purpose of this paper is to analyze the growth of the protagonist Cora from the perspective of spatial narrative in order to inherit and enrich the study of Colson Whitehead.This paper is divided into three parts,including introduction,main body and conclusion.The introduction briefly introduces Colson Whitehead and his works,and shows the current status of researches of The Underground Railroad at home and abroad and a brief description of spatial narrative theory.Meanwhile,it also introduces relationships between spatial narrative perspective and The Underground Railroad,and finally expresses the significance of the paper.The paper is built up its structure from three aspects of topographical space,social space and psychological space in the spatial narrative perspective.Therefore,main body of the paper is divided into three chapters.First,the chapter one analyzes the growth of Cora from topographical space.Topographical space drives the entire narrative process,and Cora pursued her freedom from the cotton plantation in Georgia all the way to the North.The different places chosen in the novel play pluralistic roles in the novel.It can be said that topographical space highly accelerates the growth of Cora.And the chapter two analyzes the growth of Cora from social space.Social space is another important space in the spatial narrative perspective.In this space,the author analyzes the growth of Cora from social systems,political factors,and Cora's dealings with different people and social cultures of different states.Obviously,the existence of characters constitutes a social space.On the contrary,social space is the living space of characters in the novel.Therefore,social space plays an important role in the growth of Cora.The third chapter analyzes the growth of Cora from psychological space.Psychological space is the space for characters' psychological consciousness activities.After experiencing the baptism of countless sufferings,Cora made tremendous progress in mind.Therefore,psychological changes from the ignorant stage,the exploration stage and the final awakening stage are clear manifestations of Cora's growth.The last section belongs to the conclusion of this paper containing the writer's summary of the paper and the research results,as well as the advantages and disadvantages of the paper and the future prospects.This paper is an innovative use of spatial narrative perspective to analyze the heroine Cora's growth process.This not only enriches the research directions of Colson Whitehead,but also brings great guiding significances to the growth of women.And this has also made new contributions to the development of researches on female literature and spatial narrative theory.