Narrative Strategies In Beloved: A Study Based On Bakhtin's Narrative Theories

Toni Morrison is one of the greatest contemporary American writers. She was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1993, becoming the first black writer and the second American woman writer to enjoy the honor. Her fifth novel, Beloved, is her representative work. It has won 1998 Pulitzer Price. When it was first published in September 1987, it created a sensation in American literary world and has since been regarded as a milestone in American literary history.Critics have done a lot of research on Beloved from various respects. The special narrative techniques of the novel have attracted people's strong interests, yet few have done studies based on the theory of Bakhtin. This thesis is an attempt at making a tentative analysis of narrative time, space, dialogue and voice of Beloved in the light of Bakhtin's narrative theory. Bakhtin's narrative theories, namely, chronotope, dialogism,. polyphony and carnival theory, are interpenetrated and inter-evolved. Toni Morrison's narrative strategy in Beloved incorporates the Afro-American and American mainstream narrative tradition and thus demonstrates a narrative carnival.Through the detailed analysis of narrative strategies of Beloved in terms of narrative time, space, dialogue and voices, the thesis comes to a conclusion that Beloved is a novel of delicate narrative strategies which help to deepen the theme of the novel. As a Afro-American female writer, dialog is a must to fulfill her task of bridging the gap, and dialogue is one part of her ideology, which guides her careful adoption of varied writing skills. Morrsion has a lot in common with Bakhtin in ideology and narrative theory. They all treasure two important qualities: compatibility and openness. As a perfect combination of both rich ideological content and delicate narrative form, Beloved is a modern classic.