A Study Of The Realms Of Memory In Toni Morrison's A Mercy

The Nobel Prize winner,the African-American writer Toni Morrison enjoys a reputation for the poetic imagination and profound humane care in her works.Papers and comments about her works come from various perspectives,such as race,feminism,and subjective construction.Memory is the main content in a lot of her works,especially in A Mercy,but few scholars pay attention to the perspective of memory except traumatic memory.A Mercy begins with the soliloquy of a black girl's about her nightmare,in which her mother abandons her in order to protect her little brother,and ends with the mother's monologue about the truth of the incident.The soliloquy and the monologue echo each other just like a point in a circle,where the beginning is also the end.This unique narrative technique reveals the fact that memory originates in the past,exists in the present and enlightens the future.Entering the 21 st century,people have greatly enriched their material lives,but the problem of the spiritual dependence,rootlessness,infidelity is more and more serious.As for why Morrison publishes such a novel about memories in 2008 is that she has profoundly perceived people's spiritual dilemma under the absence of freedom,love and humanity.French cultural historian Pierre Nora puts forward in his masterpiece Realms of Memory that,as entities that carry living memories,realms of memory are in permanent evolution and development,containing the ability to waken places that become mediocre gradually.What Morrison tries to construct in A Mercy are exactly such realms of memory.According to their due meanings,those realms of memory recall memory with oblivion,pursue the present with the past,and summon presence with absence,aiming to call for freedom,love and humanity and propel the awakening and introspection of individual spirit as well as realize the independence and fullness of individual personality objectively.Based on close-reading and Pierre Nora's theory about realms of memory,this thesis gives a detailed analysis of the specific connotation of the three representative realms of memory,shoes,home and belief in A Mercy,discusses their material,symbolic and functional senses,and points out that these three realms of memory are actually people's longing for freedom,love and humanity,intending to find a new perspective to understand A Mercy.