Narrative Space And Black Identity In The Underground Railroad

The 2016 National Book Awards and 2017 Pulitzer Prize winner,The Underground Railroad proves to be a successful post-modern slave narrative.Few scholars in China have studied this important work,so my research will try to make some contributions to the study of this novel.The African American author,Colson Whitehead,creates multiple layers of narrative space in the half factual,half counterfactual world which conflate genres of slave narrative,“life as a journey” and myth.Boundaries between different layers produce the theme of black identity.In the first place,Whitehead represents history in such a discontinuous way that the historical scenes in the fiction are cut off by narrative space of particular states in the country and places in each state,as if history was performed on different stages at the same time.And he also puts characters on the stages as witnesses.Literally,history is spatialized.So I employ Gabrial Zoran's concept of intemporality,the denial of time sequence,and the spatial form of juxtaposition from Michel Foucault and Joseph Frank to illustrate the meaning of the form in the novel,at the same time,tracing every fragmentary portrayal back to the history of slavery,segregation,racism in the U.S,and allude every clue of citation to its source of origin.The novel displays the destiny of the black people as an ethnic “nation” bearing broken and distorted history.Yet fragmentary representations are truer than historical texts,revealing something deeper about the black identity.In the second place,the heroine Cora experienced the ups and downs of her race as a whole when she travelled from one place to another.Her awareness of identity evolved with her personal space extending and contracting in the pursuit of liberation.So I will observe her personal space in light of Wesley A Kort's Place and Space in Modern Fiction in which relationships between narrative space and characters are clearly elaborated.Cora's personal space was destroyed for several times when being raped,whipped,examined in the hospital,which left a deep scar on her body and heart.But she never quit.Her identity is a human striving for unalienable rights and freedom that the whites enjoy.Or,simply speaking,she pursued for equality.In the third place,there are space images of libraries and the Underground Railroad which frequent the book at a high speed.Inspired by the idea of Gaston Bachelard,the metaphor of space,I explore the meaning of these two images in the novel.Libraries symbolizing knowledge enlightened slaves and awakened them to rebel and meanwhile they supply diverse cultures which very likely produce identity for blacks.The Underground Railroad as stations accommodating fugitives became real in the story.However,it behaved mercilessly.The rate of successful escape through trains remained rather low because of relentless slave catchers and unstable political environment.Cora's companies died one by one.Helpers on the railroad were persecuted one by one.Lastly,only she survived.Thus the railroad embodies self-reliance which supports blacks to create new identities.So in this sense,the blacks are people who invented their identities.The three layers of narrative space witness the evolution of black identity.In sum,they are the people who suffered from plight for a long span and who still endeared to achieve justice white people enjoy.More importantly,the blacks embrace human civilizations,so they can identify with any school of cultures.In today's America,blacks are free to choose their own identities.But they still need to identify with their own people based on these identities and create new black identities in order to take the initiative in political sphere.