Polyphonic Narrative In Gish Jen’s The Love Wife

Gish Jen(1955-)is a pretty popular Chinese American female writer after Maxine Hong Kingston and Amy Tan,and is one of the chief generals of the second-generation Chinese American literary explosion in the 1990 s.Gish Jen’s literary creations have exerted considerable influence in the American literary world.Her short stories were selected for Best American Short Stories in 1988,1995 and 2013 respectively.Her work revolves around the lives of minorities,focusing on their affirmation of cultural identity and their pursuit of dreams as Americans.The Love wife,published in 2004,has attracted widespread public attention.Different from previous works focusing on Chinese,in this novel,Gish Jen focuses the narrative on a new American family characterized by multiculturalism.The novel tells the story of a multiracial American family’s conflicts over adoption and interracial marriage.This thesis attempts to incorporate textual analysis into theoretical exploration to illustrate how brilliant and exquisite the narrative strategies of The Love Wife,drawing on the narratological theories of some theorists such as M.M.Bakhtin and G.Genette.Taking polyphonic narrative as the decoding point,this thesis will deeply interpret Gish Jen’s application of the polyphonic narrative from three levels: narrative discourse,narrative structure,and narrative space.Combined with the text,polyphony in narrative discourse point to equality of all beings;polyphony in narrative structure imply the fluidity of identity;polyphony in narrative space indicate the benign interaction between Chinese and American cultures.Then,the thesis will further explore multiculturalism hidden behind the polyphonic narrative skills.In The Love Wife,Gish Jen’s strategic use of polyphonic narrative exhibits the brighter,shining,and golden facets of Chinese American literature.In view of this,this thesis attempts to analyze The Loved Wife from the perspective of narratology,and explores Jen’s conscious use of narrative techniques and affirms that she uses her own way to refute racial discrimination and cultural hegemony in her works through the discourse of resistance and opposition,and further promotes the idea of multiculturalism centered on cultural equality and cultural tolerance.