Self-Refashioning In The Postcolonial Bildungsroman

Designated as a resistant narrative,the postcolonial Bildungsroman occupies a dominant position in the postcolonial literature for articulating the latter's main political imperatives,namely,to counteract the colonialist/imperialist discourse and to build the nationalist cultural identity.Generally speaking,the postcolonial Bildungsroman either inherits the narrative convention of modernist anti-Bildungsroman,turning to the formalistic subversion as opposition to the colonialist/imperialist ideology,or follows the postcolonial magic realist narrative convention,using the mystic elements that partake of vernacular cultural meanings as assertion of nationalist cultural identity.In many cases,the two modalities overlap.However,the postcolonial Bildungsroman is more than a novel of resistance,instead it has more than these two patterns.The previous researches often ignore those postcolonial Bildungsromane written in realistic mode.Moreover,critics focus more on the political implications underlying these novels than their formalistic features.The current study attends to this line of postcolonial Bildungsroman and chooses four postcolonial novels written in realistic mode,including V.S.Naipaul's The Mystic Masseur(1957),Caryl Phillips's The Final Passage(1985),Hanif Kureishi's The Buddha of Suburbia(1990),and Bharati Mukherjee's Miss New India(2012),as research objects to investigate their narrative features as a subgenre.This study adopts the textual approach to explore how the classic Bildungsroman is appropriated by these postcolonial writers in terms of plot patterning,narrative structure,characterization and character relation as well as speech representation,and then excavates the thematic meanings as well as cultural implications of these narrative deviations by consulting their historic-cultural particulars.The postcolonial Bildungsroman not only voices resistance,but also concerns such thematics as mimicry,hybridity of identity,displacement and transcultural experiences.Besides,the subgenre deals with gender politics.The Mystic Masseur modifies its classic antecedent by repeatedly disrupting and inverting its progressive plot.Its circuitous plot shows a Trinidad-born Indian youth Ganesh's convoluted trajectory of growth affected by the English way of developing oneself to integrate into society and the Hindu way of cultivating oneself to be a reclusive scholar,whereas the interruptions and reversions of the plot betray his failure to fashion himself into an English man or a Hindi intellectual,but becoming a mystic masseur and eventually a politician.The story of Ganesh's para-Bildung realistically depicts the life of East Indians in Trinidad in late colonial time and expresses the theme of mimicry.In The Final Passage,the author creates a fractured representational structure by means of an intricate textual organization,conceptualization of three chronotopes and leaky character relations,highlighting its Afro-Caribbean heroine Leila's displacement and vagueness of identity.Through Leila's formative experience on her migratory journey from Caribbean to England,the novel presents the living condition of the first generation Commonwealth immigrants caught between their countries of origin and Britain.This novel reveals the postcolonial Bildungsroman's thematic concern with the hybridity of identity and diasporic experiences.The Buddha of Suburbia adapts its classic forerunner in terms of characterization.Kureishi deploys popular music and theatre to model an anti-hero,an Indian British teenager Karim,who crosses the normative lines of identity,be it gender,class,sexual,or ethnic,and reconstructs his heterogeneous identities as an Indian and a Briton.By Karim's initiation story,the author represents the life of the younger generation of immigrants who spares no efforts to assimilate into the dominant society and make their ethnicity part of British national identity.The themes of hybridity and transcultural experience of the postcolonial Bildungsroman are evident in this novel.Miss New India modifies its classic precedent with its use of thought presentation to capture its heroine's awakening to self-autonomy and growth to gain independence.Anjali's development from a submissive compliant daughter to a self-reliant woman embodies India's rise to a rapidly developing country after decolonization.The scrutiny of this novel suggests that the postcolonial Bildungsroman also entails the gender politics,to be more specific,the criticism of Indian patriarchy.The four postcolonial Bildungsromane appropriate the classic Bildungsroman in ingenious ways to express the author's view of colonial mimicry,hybridity,displacement and female autonomy.Rather than just using anti-development as resistance,the postcolonial youths also actively develop themselves and assimilate to the society as a citizen.The present research is a revision to the monolithic view of the postcolonial Bildungsroman as a resistant narrative.