Quest For Identity In David Dabydeen's Early Novels

David Dabydeen is a Guyanese writer who was born in Guyana and migrated with his families to Britain when he was ten. Due to his complexity of his identity, his novels are usually concerned with the theme of identity exploration. This thesis intends to explore three Dabydeen's early novels The Intended (1991) Disappearance (1993), and The Counting House (1996) which will be set out in a postcolonial context to explore the hybridity of the identity by examining the identity theme with regard to the ethnicity, culture, history and the construction of diaspora identity.In the first, this thesis introduces the theory of postcolonialism, its related concepts such as hybridity and syncreticity, and concepts of identity, cultural identity and diaspora identity. Based on the previous theoretical studies of postcolonialism, the popular trend of postcolonial study is analyzed. The brief introduction of David Dabydeen and his three early novels are given. Summaries of comments on the novels are also presented which primarily includes the comments on three novels applied in this thesis by David Dabydeen himself and other famous writers or critics who are mostly from foreign countries. Furthermore, this thesis demonstrates the process of identity quest exemplified by The Intended, Disappearance and The Counting House, from the point of view of diaspora identity, cultural identity and historical identity respectively. In The Intended, the process of construction of diaspora identity not only involves the narrator's personal identity quest but also includes his friends'as a shadow of most Asians living in Britain. Cultural identity as the major theme in the novel Disappearance is discussed while the character are struggled between the Black and White cultures under the influence of postcolonial culture. History, for Guyanese, is always broken and uncompleted while the actual and cruel history of Dabydeen's ancestors is displayed through his vivid description and imagination in The Counting House, examining the historical reason of protagonists'distressful destiny and the historical identity of Indian Guyanese.From a rather new viewpoint, this thesis proves that David Dabydeen in his early novels aims at creating his early novels as a system of dating back to the past and root to quest for the construction of hybrid identity in the postcolonial context. Hopefully, this thesis can be helpful, to some extent, in paving the road of study of Dabydeen's early novels in China.