An Analysis Of Alex's Identity Exploration In The Autograph Man

Zadie Smith is an English novelist,essayist,and short story writer.In 2000 when she was merely twenty-four years old,her debut White Teeth was published,making her become famous.In 2002,her second work The Autograph Man was published,which was a commercial success and won Jewish Quarterly Wingate Literary Prize in 2003.Her other published works include On Beauty(2005),NW(2012)and so forth.Being the second generation of an immigrant family,she has a white English father and a black Jamaican mother.Smith's immigrant background has made a huge influence on her literary creation.Her novels are related to immigration,racial and ethnic conflicts,religious fanaticism and multiculturalism.The Autograph Man Alex-Li Tandem is a man living on selling autographs.He is obsessed with his idol Kitty Alexander.He is the second generation of the immigrant family who settle down in Mountjoy,a suburb in north London.His father is Chinese and his mother is a Jew.At the end of the wrestling match,his father suddenly died.Alex can not accept the fact of father's death.In order to prove whether the Alexander's autograph is a real one or not,he goes to New York.And he meets Kitty and persuades her to go back to London together.With her passing away news,he wins money and earns fame.However,he is lonelier than ever before.In the end,he recites Kaddish for his father before his friends.This thesis consists of introduction,four chapters and conclusion.In the introduction,the author Zadie Smith and her immigration background,the theme and structure of The Autograph Man are introduced,which leads to the main part of the paper.In the first chapter,the literature review both abroad and at home is studied.And the theory of Hybridity and the Third Space put forward by post-colonist Homi Bhabha is explained.Homi Bhabha thinks that there is a third space when two cultures contact.In the third space,the boundary between different cultures blurs.As the mutual influence of the colonizers' culture and the colonized culture,cultural hegemony gradually deconstructs.There is no pureness in the third space.This paper aims to analyze Alex's identity exploration,combined with Bhabha's hybridity and third space.The second chapter analyzes the loss of Alex's identity.Alex has to face his mixed races.He is confronted with cultural clashes and tortured with mental disorder,especially depression.As the second generation of immigration,Alex-Li Tandem's race,as complicated as his name,is mixed with Chinese and Jewish blood.And living in London,he is confused about his identity.With father's partial love on Alex,Alex is deeply influenced by Chinese culture,the Jewish culture represented by mother and the western culture as a mainstream existing in London.The clashes of different cultures lead to Alex's identity crisis.The third chapter analyzes Alex's pursuit of his identity.On the one hand,he chases fame,money,social status and enjoys pop culture in the west.On the other hand,he also learns Judaic rituals,makes his own Kabbalah tree and tries to know Jewish history.He studies Chinese Zen and other Chinese cultural elements.However,Alex fails in his pursuit.He takes advantage of an American actress Alexander to chase fame and money,but when he finally sells her autograph with a high price at auction,he feels lonely.His faith in Jewish religion is not as pious as Adam's.He is too tired and bored to search the Jewish history as seeing the horrible holocaust.His meditation on Zen is not thorough and even a standard sitting is hard for him.Therefore,he does not absolutely belong to any of the three cultures.According to Bhabha,cultures are never unitary in themselves,nor simply dualistic in relation of self to other and all forms of culture are continually in a process of hybridity.Through the analysis in this chapter,the conclusion is that Alex fails in being the “other” or the “self” on his identity journey.The fourth chapter discusses Alex's construction of identity in the third space,which is on the basis of Homi Bhabha's theory.Alex's specific action in his daily life is studied.He finally reads Kaddish for his father.He puts father's one pound note on the Kabbalah chart.His Jewishness and Goyishness filled with modernity is also discussed.And his rethinking of his vocation is detailed.With the influence of Zen,he donates all the money to the dying Duchamp and Alexander.Through the analysis,Alex's identity does not belong to any one of the three cultures.His hybridity identity can only be constructed in the third space.The last part is the conclusion.It makes a conclusion about Alex-Li-Tandem's identity loss,his pursuit of a certain identity and his identity construction in the thirdspace.Cultures are not in opposite stations but blend with one another.Actually,Alex is a representative of the marginalized group living in the muti-cultural Britain.As the second generation of immigrants,on the one hand,they are not totally nourished in the soil of root culture.On the other hand,they are not absolutely accepted by the west world.Their identities belong to neither this nor that but a third space.With the deep development of globalization and the mutual clashes and exchanges between cultures,the identity problems of marginalized groups should be paid much attention.This thesis hopes to provide enlightenment for those people who suffer from identity crisis.