The Construction Of Narrative Space In Brick Lane

Monica Ali’s debut novel Brick Lane makes her outstanding in contemporary British Literature. She was included in Granta’s list of the Best Young British Novelists in2003. Brick Lane is the first novel to focus exclusively on the Bangladeshi female immigrants in Britain. It displays a colorful world for the readers. Based on Gabriel Zoran’s theory of space in narrative, the essay analyses the vertical structure of the space in Brick Lane from the topographical, chronotopic and textual levels respectively with the purpose of revealing the important role of space in shaping the characters, promoting the development of the plots and enhancing the artistic appeal of the novel. The topographical level of Brick Lane is composed of physical environment, mental environment and characters’bodies. In physical environment the specific articles either carry symbolic meanings or contribute to the development of characters’identity and the plots. The mental environment is the fighting field for Bangladeshi women’s struggle for power of discourse and their struggle against fate and negative religious influence. Both the characters’different selections of clothes and the emancipation or suppression of their physical parts imply the subjective changes in their consciousness or the repression of their self-awareness. The chronotopic level of the novel consists of synchronic and diachronic relations. In the part of the synchronic relations, characters’activities in relatively static space are discussed to reveal the two generations of immigrants’different attitude towards Bangladeshi and British cultures and their consideration of identities, the social space in Brick Lane community and the confinement and oppression of women by the patriarchal society in Bangladesh. When explaining the diachronic relations, the essay analyses the trajectories of the protagonist’s life, her husband’s life and her growth to prove that cross-border activities are the reflection of the characters’change in thinking and they are also the driving force of the plots’development. The textual level of the novel is influenced by the selective of language, the linearity of the text and the perspectival structure. Concerning language Ali adopts defamiliarization to reconstruct the familiar yet ignored space to attract the readers’attention and offer them an immersive experience. Considering the linearity of the text, the sequence of the appearance of Brick Lane community implies its unified or disconnected character in relation with its surroundings. With regard to the perspectival structure, the essay explores the relationship between the specific space Brick Lane (here) and its cultural background Bangladesh (there), analyses the wild differences between the golden motherland in the immigrants’mind and the real Bangladesh and explains the influence of diaspora on the immigrants. Under the guidance of Zoran’s theory, the scrutinization of Brick Lane displays various patches of space. The explorations of the space not only offer a new perspective of appreciating the novel, but also prove the practicality of Zoran’s theory in analyzing the space in narrative.