An Interpretation Of Walter Mosley’s Devil In A Blue Dress From The Perspective Of Spatial Narrative

As one of the most famous African American detective novelists,Walter Mosley(1952-)has enjoyed many praises as well as numerous awards since the publication of his maiden work in 1990.Superb narrative skills,profound topics,along with the strong sense of social and historical responsibility,all contribute to the great success of his detective novels.Devil in a Blue Dress,as Mosley’s most representative work,has received some academic analysis by scholars both at home and abroad.However,studies on the novel from the perspective of spatial narrative are rather rare and limited.For this reason,the thesis aims to do a detailed research on Mosley’s debut novel based on Gabriel Zoran’s theory of spatial narrative to analyze his extraordinary spatial narrative skills,and then tries to clarify Mosley’s great concerns for African American people’s fate and the criticism of racial problems in American society.The thesis is divided into five parts.The first part gives a brief introduction to Walter Mosley and his most famous work Devil in a Blue Dress,briefly demonstrates the development of spatial narrative theory and Gabriel Zoran’s spatial model,and presents the research trends both at home and abroad.Chapter One mainly focuses on two pairs of opposite complexes of space in the topographical dimension.Through the construction of Easy’s little house,Los Angeles,white areas and the black community on both objective and ontological levels,Mosley constructs a total space portraying a vivid spatial image of African American people’s living predicament.Chapter Two makes an analysis of diachronic complex of space of the text in the chronotopic dimension,which helps to present the self-awakening process of the protagonist on the spatial level.Furthermore,the rest and motion relationships between white and black characters described by Mosley on the synchronic level reveal the fact that whites squeeze African Americans’ living space and force them to the path of destruction while making Easy’s self-awakening process more convincible.Chapter Three mainly discusses the space construction in the textual dimension.The spatial narrative skills applied by Mosley such as the selectivity of language and the use of perspectival structure not only lay a solid cultural and historical foundation of the novel but also show the writer’s high praise of African Americans’ adherence to their own culture and identity.The last part makes a summary of the previous three chapters and proceeds to present Mosley’s opinions about African Americans’ living predicament,culture and identity,which offers an innovative perspective to analyze detective novels.The analysis of Devil in a Blue Dress based on Gabriel Zoran’s theory of spatial narrative highlights the racial predicament confronting African Americans,which can hopefully help the readers to get a better understanding of Mosley’s extraordinary narrative skills and the profound themes of race in the novel.