| Michael Ondaatje is a prestigious immigrant writer in contemporary Canadian literary circle.He was born in Sri Lanka with a hybrid ancestry of Dutch,English,Sinhalese,and Tamil,and immigrated to England and Canada successively.With the same book The English Patient(1992),he won the Man Booker Prize twice in 1992 and 2018.Due to his hybrid ancestry and intricate migration experience,hybridity has always been an essential theme in Michael Ondaatje’s literary creation.In the three novels set on different historical backgrounds of his home country Sri Lanka,namely Running in the Family(1 982),Anil s Ghost(2000)and The Cat’s Table(2011),Ondaatje created many characters sharing the same hybrid experience with him.With the help of the concepts of mimicry,cultural translation and the third space in Homi K.Bhabha’s hybridity theory,through the analysis of different phenomena of hybridity and the subsequent influences on these characters,this thesis aims to examine Michael Ondaatje’s views on hybridity reflected in identity,culture and politicsThis thesis is divided into five parts.The first chapter introduces Michael Ondaatje’s life and his works,provides an overview of Ondaatje studies,and briefly expounds the research ideas and the layout of this thesis.The second chapter studies Running in the Family and explores different identities and choices of the Sri Lankan half-breeds under the background of colonial intermarriage policy.The third chapter examines The Cat’s Table and analyzes the reconstruction and change of different Sri Lankan migrants’ concepts of culture after cultural exchange and negotiation during the migration from Sri Lanka to England.The fourth chapter researches on Anil’s Ghost and probes into the influence of hybrid experience on individual political affiliations and political viewpoints in the context of the Sri Lankan Civil War.The fifth chapter is the conclusion.This thesis concludes that as a postcolonial writer,Ondaatje does not have an absolutely positive attitude towards hybridity as others do,but rather,through creating characters with similar hybrid experience as himself and revealing the negative consequences of hybridity on these characters,demonstrates his concern about hybridity,and provides some enlightenment for how to treat hybridity in the era of globalization. |
