Cat's Eye: A Bildungsroman With Postmodern Characteristics

Canadian female writer Margaret Atwood is a well-known poet, novelist and story-writer in contemporary literary world. Her seventh novel Cat's Eye gained an immediate success upon its publication in 1988 and was crowned as "Atwood's most artistically accomplished novel thus far". To date, literary critics have analyzed the themes and narrative techniques of the novel from a wide variety of angles such as feminism, post-colonialism, intertextuality and psychoanalysis. This thesis attempts to interpret Cat's Eye from both bildungsroman and postmodern perspectives. Chapter One gives a brief introduction to Margaret Atwood's life, works and previous studies of Cat's Eye by other scholars, and states the structure and aim of this thesis. Chapter Two traces the bildungsroman tradition manifested in Cat's Eye, which will be dealt with from four main aspects, namely, the autobiographical elements of Cat s Eye, the heroine's growing journey from her childhood to adulthood, the tension between the heroine and reality, and the characterization of traditional bildungsroman as revealed in the novel. Chapter Three explores the postmodern features in Cat's Eye. Not only deconstruction of binary oppositions and postmodern view of time in the novel embody postmodern characteristics, Atwood's use of indeterminacy, parody and meta-fiction also well represents postmodern essence. At last, Chapter Four concludes the above-analyzed parts and points out that Atwood is a master of both bildungsroman and postmodern writing.