The Unknown Truth In The Known World

Edward·P·Jones is a contemporary African-American writer with outstanding literary achievements.His novel The Known World is not only nominated for the National Book Award in the same year it was published,but also won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction,the National Book Critic Circle Award for fiction,the International Dublin Literary Award,the MacArthur Prize and many other literary awards.As one of Jones' masterpieces,The Known World is characterized by Neo-slave narrative.Based on the South Plantations of black slave owners which are rarely explored by previous black writers,this novel delves into slavery from the interracial relationship to the intraracial relationship.Therefore,it evokes profound reflections on freedom and slavery.This thesis puts forward that the novel not only inherits the slave narrative in terms of historical subject,but also rewrites this genre's established themes,figures and artistic forms in the new creation context.Its aim is to reveal more of the unknown truth from the known slavery history.Through the re-narration and re-construction of slave history,this novel uncovers more unknown truths which need to be researched.What's more,the closer exploration of history has reshaped the understanding of races relations,black history and black identity in the Unites States.This paper is made up of five parts.The first part is the introduction,which introduces Jones' life experience and his novel The Known World.In addition,it also introduces the literary survey and existing problems of this work by domestic and foreign scholars,and finally summarizes the characteristics of the slave narrative and the Neo-slave narrative.Chapter One analyzes the thematic expansion of the slave narrative in The Known World.First of all,with the focus on the black slave owners,the novel displays the historical truth within the black race.Through revealing the falsity of the slave history in slave narrative,this novel presents a comprehensive black slave history.Secondly,the novel also highlights the important influence of black culture which helps black people to find their roots of racial culture.Thus it provides a strong cultural support for the blacks to confirm their cultural identity and seize the discourse power.ChapterTwo focuses on the supplements of traditional figures of slave narrative in The Known World.First of all,the novel complements the inherent pattern of black male's pursuit of freedom,that is,the circle of literacy-identity-freedom.By changing its order,it challenges the channels of black male's pursuit of freedom.At the same time,the novel endows the family with the important meaning to the freedom and proposes a new pattern of family-identity-freedom.Secondly,the novel adds the perspective of black women who are no longer the bystanders in slave history.Thus it reshapes the images of black female slaves.Chapter Three discusses the formal innovation of slave narrative in The Known World.The novel uses intertextuality and the non-chronology narrative time to make its structure more complex than slave narrative.The description of its disordered narrative time breaks the boundary between time and space and dispels the center.Therefore,it enhances the vitality and tension of the novel and makes people have a deeper understanding of slavery in the South.The last part is a summary of the thesis.The novel rewrites the slave narrative from the aspects of themes,characters and form,which provides an important reference for the later creation of Neo-slave narrative.Meanwhile,this novel treats slavery as a historical phenomenon with profound cultural significance and social influence.It revises the history written by white people,thus arousing readers' attention to the association between history,the present and the future.