Quest For Lost Identities—A Study Of The Narrative Strategies In The Inheritance Of Loss By Kiran Desai

Kiran Desai is an Indian author;and also a permanent resident of the United States.She is the daughter of the noted Indian woman writer Anita Desai.Her novel The Inheritance of Loss won the Man Booker Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Fiction Award in 2006.It takes her seven years to write the novel.The novel has been translated into more than 40 languages up to now.Scholars usually study the novel in terms of post-colonization and culture identity ever since it was published.In this thesis,the author tries to analyze the novel adopting the narrative time theory and spatial narrative theory to have a research on people’s quest for the lost identities in the colonized countries.This is the innovation of the thesis.The Inheritance of Loss is a radiant,fascinating and moving family saga.Desai illustrates a family of three generations living in the same dilapidated mansion,northeast of Himalaya.They are "the waiting figures",a retired old judge,a sixteen-year-old granddaughter girl Sai and a cook with no name.People live in their own life at this quiet corner far away from the problems of economic globalization,post-colonization and racialism.The change of the world in the mansion is invisible and impalpable.In the late 1980s,culture and racial conflicts took place on the border of India and Nepal,the old world was going to topple down,and the new world has not been built up yet.People did not know how to start,but like termites were swallowing up the mansion,the reality collapsed in front of people.As a result,loss develops into a kind of password,a mysterious constituent part in gene strand,generation after generation.The author of the thesis adopts the modern narrative theory as instruction,to analyze the novel from two aspects:spatial and temporal.With the narrative time theory,Desai studies the novel from three aspects as order,duration and frequency.She adopts spatial narrative theory at the same time,the narrative representation of space and the narrative strategies of space.With simple plots,conversion of time and space,shift of memory from reality,the novel reflects the great abilities of Desai’s narrative techniques.The author of the thesis read through the novel with particular thoroughness and analysis,learning so much about the novelist who is concerned with the fate of people in her hometown,to exploring deeply how the Indians,had suffered from colonial trauma and pursuit their lost identities in the new era.