An Analysis Of Characters' Identity In Bone From The Perspective Of Narrative Time Theory

American literature has always been fascinated with the issue of identity. With the increasing multiracial awareness, identity has become a heated topic in Chinese American literature in the past decades. Fae Myenne Ng's Bone talks about the identity puzzle in a Chinese family in the Chinatown of San Francisco and reflects the family members' different attitudes toward identity. Up to now, the literary criticisms on Bone both at home and abroad can be roughly categorized into three groups:feminism criticism, post colonialism criticism and psychoanalysis criticism. There are also other papers which deal with culture shock and symbolism. Yet, few critics focus on the issue of Chinese Americans'identity from three aspects of narrative time theory---narrative order, narrative duration and narrative frequency. The structure arrangement of the novel enables the author to relate vividly the story of the Chinese Americans puzzled by the dilemma of identities. Apparently, Ng disassembles and reassembles the story time, which leads to temporary chaos of the structure. In effect, the novel is very well-knit, the writing technique of which not only evades the flaw of flat narration but also make available the display of the modernist's way of thinking.Therefore, my thesis will study the identity issue of the Chinese American from the perspective of Genette's narrative time theory, and then analyze how the characters' attitudes toward identity are disclosed respectively from aspects of narrative order, narrative time and narrative frequency. Firstly, on narrative order, Ng makes bulky use of analepsis and prolepsis in the principal part of the novel. However, she shuffles the temporal sequence while popping out the diachronic narrative progression, which assumes a distinctive centripetal orientation inherited from the narrative tradition. Under this narrative structure, the phenomenon of identity loss represented by the first Chinese American immigrants is vividly performed. Secondly, on narrative duration, based on the relationship of narrative time and story time, this part respectively probes four types of narrative tempo:summary, scene, pause and ellipsis. Ng presents the different choices toward identity by the first generation of Chinese American women and second generation of Chinese American. Finally, the narrative frequency mainly focuses.on repetition: narrating n times what happened once. The death of the second daughter Ona appears many times in the novel which reflects the confusion of the second generation of Chinese American toward their identity in Chinese and American cultures. This thesis concludes that the Chinese Americans who survive in the crash of Chinese and American cultures are an indispensable part of American ethnic groups. Confronting with the identity, Chinese Americans need to accept two aspects of their culture identity and establish a new identity based on their bicultural background, which is the most effective solution to the identity confusion.