The compound I: Narrative and identity in the novels of Toni Morrison, Louise Erdrich, and Amy Tan

Toni Morrison, Louise Erdrich, and Amy Tan have revised Euro-American conventions of self-representation in order to describe a compound, multivocal, interdependent identity--one which more closely mirrors the bi- or multi-cultural American heritage of the characters and communities they describe. I read their texts as "identity narratives"--like many novels by minority American authors, these display a primary intent to explore the boundaries and implications of identity--and so trace their innovations in self-conception and narrative representation back through autobiographical texts. I also explore the authors' debts to oral narrative traditions that, among other things, model ways to include a heterogeneous audience in the reading and identity-creating process.;Chapter 1, "Not Simply Myself: Renegotiating the Boundaries of Autobiography," reviews the normative conventions of Euro-American autobiography: first-person narration, chronological coverage, and true confession, leading to a discrete, monovocal self. I then examine autobiographies by women writers and by minority American writers that revise the traditional paradigm to represent identity as multifaceted, polyvocal, and affiliative. Chapter 2, "She gather me': The Chorus of I in Toni Morrison's Novels," discusses how Morrison draws from African American and women's autobiographical traditions to construct multifaceted, multivocal identities for individuals and communities. I use the metaphor of a chorus to help explain how Morrison's narrative strategies in The Bluest Eye, Song of Solomon, and especially Beloved construct and reinforce the idea of a single identity comprising many voices. Chapter 3, "Mediation and Survival: Louise Erdrich's Dreamcatcher Narratives," explores Erdrich's incorporation of Native American oral traditions and cultural perspectives in Love Medicine, The Beet Queen, and Tracks. Both the narration and the represented selves of Erdrich's novels follow a "dreamcatcher" model, wherein a complex web of lives and stories is woven tightly across a circular frame. Chapter 4, "Yin and Yankee: Amy Tan's Balancing Act," focuses on Tan's "yin-yang" emphasis on the balance between isolation and assimilation. Her multivocal narrative strategies in The Joy Luck Club and The Kitchen God's Wife help her to incorporate all relevant perspectives into a stable, multifaceted Chinese American identity.