Representation Of The Historical Reality

Morrison inherits the literary traditions of James Joyce, William Faulkner andother predecessors and develops her own unique style, blending magic realism in LatinAmerican literature with African American traditions rooted in her native soil. Herworks are "beautifully written, a milestone in American literary history"and "mythicaland magnificent, with a force and rhythm of myth", having some characteristics ofmagic realism, which have reflected the African American reality and history.Consequently, Toni Morrison has been called a woman writer of magic realism tocompose "modern myth".In this epical work Beloved, Morrison employs nearly all the modern narrativetechniques, mixing the marvelous and the real, fact and fiction, the past and the present,blending symbol, metaphor, exaggeration, shifts in time and place, the supernatural,destroying the demarcation between the subjective world and the objective world.Throughout the story, ghost regularly mingles with the living, creating a "myth world"without losing its function of reflecting the reality. Furthermore, it deepens the subjectmatter of representing reality. Attracted by her magic power and perplexed by thevague boundary between fact and fiction, the reader endeavors to seek for the author'simplication in the magical world. Unlike her forefathers whose slave narratives werealmost in the form of autobiography characterized by keeping silent about the interiorlife, Morrison explores the nature of slavery and its mental damage and theAfro-Americans'ambivalence, fearfulness and love in life.Why does the novel achieve so great a success and such a vibrating artistic charm?It is argued that the reasons lie in the following: firstly, Morrison follows the artisticprinciples and techniques of magic realism to reflect the American reality at thatparticular time; secondly, the author employs the technique of ambiguity and an openending, leaving the reader much imagination and summoning the reader to participatein the "writing"to gain more information from the text.The present thesis begins with Morison's life experience in an attempt to seek themotivation of her use of magic realism, follows it up with her application of its artisticprinciples and techniques in Beloved with a view to reconstructing the AfricanAmerican history and representing the American reality, and ends with a conclusion:The greatness of this work lies not only in Morrison's brilliant narrative techniques ofmagic realism, but also in the deep thought implied, especially a black woman writer'smoral responsibility and her commitment to language.Through the study of magic realism in Beloved, this thesis aims at exploringMorrison's reconstructing the Afro-American history from a new perspective. It willhelp to get some knowledge of Morrison's magnificent narrative techniques and get aninsight into the profundities: Never forget the history and look at the facts without bias.