Narrative Construction Of Self-Identity In Doctorow's Bildungsroman

American Jewish writer E.L.Doctorow excels in making good use of various narrative strategies while taking significant historical events as his creative background to provide panoramic pictures of American society in a specific historical period.In his inventive practice of literature,Doctorow pays full attention to the inextricable link between thematic matters and narrative strategies.Published successively in the 1980 s,Loon Lake,World's Fair,and Billy Bathgate are Doctorow's trilogy dwelling on the Great Depression happened in the 1930 s.Applying Bildungsroman as the plot structuring principle,character-narrators in these novels tell their formative life experiences by means of retrospective narration with the objective of understanding the past and of constructing self-identity.Based on the obvious privilege that narrative has in constructing self-identity,together with the thematic concern for the self in the genre of Bildungsroman,the present author conducts a close textual analysis with the support of narrative strategies so as to interpret the condition,process and consequence of narrative construction of self-identity in Doctorow's Depression-era Bildungsroman.