An Analysis Of The Protagonists’ Identity Construction In Little Fires Everywhere From The Perspective Of Mirror Theory

Celeste Ng is a post-80s Chinese American writer who has conquered the literary circles in Europe and America.After the publication of her first novel Everything I Never Told You,Celeste Ng published her second novel named Little Fires Everywhere in 2017.Unsurprisingly,Little Fires Everywhere was also a great success and caused widespread discussion among readers.The New York Times praised this novel as an even more accomplished work than her debut.It mainly focuses on the life of two families and intends to set the two families as opposites in terms of family background,lifestyle,and ideology.The life of the Richardsons is rich and stable,which is the representative of the mainstream American society,while Mia and her daughter have been wandering in turbulence and freedom,which is the representative of the marginalized people in American society.In the process of meeting and colliding the lives of the two families,some characters in the novel gradually discovered the unique truth about life.Based on Jacques Lacan’s Mirror Theory,this thesis examines the authorial intentions of eliminating identity alienation and constructing the identities of the protagonists embodied in the novel,aiming to figure out the solution to how to be brave to get rid of the shackles of rigid rules and how to be free to live in a foreign country.This thesis can be divided into three parts,introduction,main body,and conclusion.The content is as follows:First of all,the introduction briefly describes the life of the author Celeste Ng and the story of her work Little Fires Everywhere.Then,it summarizes the current research status of Little Fires Everywhere by scholars at home and abroad.And finally,it discusses the theoretical and practical significance.The main body of the thesis is divided into three chapters:The first chapter analyzes the reasons for the loss of the two protagonists’ identities in the Pre-Mirror Stage.Because of the lack of autonomy and sense of security,Izzy and Pearl lost their identities in the family respectively,and Izzy’s marginalized living state and Pearl’s loss of sense of belonging have caused their lack of identity in society.The second chapter analyzes the two protagonists’ misrecognition of their identities in the Mirror Stage.Izzy misrecognizes herself as the oddball in her family or the abnormal people in society,and Pearl misrecognizes herself as the unidentified illegitimate daughter of Mia or the stranger in Shaker Heights which caused the alienation of the protagonists and the dilemma of the identity construction.The third chapter analyzes how the protagonists got rid of the crisis of identity construction in the Post-Mirror Stage.Under the guidance of Mia,Izzy completes the establishment of the independent personality by rebelling against the rigid rules;Pearl finds the meaning of family and life through her mother’s confession.The conclusion summarizes the previous chapters and further explores the solutions to the survival dilemma of marginalized people bound by rigid rules and the strangers lived in foreign countries by summarizing the construction of the protagonists’ identities in the three stages,and integrates these solutions with the theory to analyze the theme of the work.Thus,at the theoretical level,the thesis can better analyze the creative intention behind the theme of the novel based on the Mirror Theory and provide a new research idea;at the practical level,the thesis also provides some useful survival rules for the marginalized people in foreign lands,which has certain practical significance.