A Study Of The Neo-slave Narrative In The Underground Railroad

As a celebrated contemporary African American writer with six novels and two works of non-fiction,Colson Whitehead manages to shock and move readers with a variety of themes and styles.Harvard Magazine awarded him the title of "literary chameleon".Since the publication of his first novel,The Intuitionist,he has made his name in contemporary American literature.The Underground Railroad is the eighth work,but it is the first of his novels that deals with the issue of slavery directly.It tells the story of a black slave girl,who took the "underground railroad" to escape to the North in the mid-19 th century.Although the novel is about slavery,it largely differs from traditional slave narratives.Based a on close reading of the text and the study of the neo-slave narrative genre,this paper attempts to analyze features of the neo-slave narrative in The Underground Railroad.The neo-slave narrative is derived from the slave narrative,a literary genre involving the written autobiographical accounts of enslaved Africans in Great Britain and its colonies.The neo-slave narrative refers to the literary genre of contemporary narratives of slavery written after the Civil War.As a parody of the slave narrative,the neo-slave narrative has its characteristics in thematic focus,character design,and narrative techniques.With the neo-slave narrative,Whitehead makes some innovations in the design of the character and the narrative techniques,which are aptly shown in The Underground Railroad.The present paper is composed of five parts.Chapter one introduces Colson Whitehead and his creation of The Underground Railroad.Also,this chapter compares the slave narrative with the neo-slave narrative.Chapter two lists the literature review concerning this novel at home and abroad.Chapter three discusses three types of characters in this novel,which greatly differ from the stereotyped images in slave narratives.First,Whitehead creates several positive mothers to rebuke the “mammy” image.Second,Whitehead sets up a vulnerable and yet rebellious black girl as the protagonist,instead of a heroic and loyal black man in previous slave narratives,as well as paying attention to the most vulnerable communities,trying to justify their struggles for freedom.Third,he portrays a wide range of white characters to rewrite the stereotyped whites.Chapter four analyzes three neo-slave narrative techniques in Whitehead's novel.Colson Whitehead discards the fixed and univocal first-person narrative in previous slave narratives,replacing it with neo-slave narrative techniques such as intertextuality,anachronism,and shifting focalizations in this novel.Intertextuality could make the plots of his novel more complicated and interesting.As for the anachronism,analepsis and prolepsis not only offer readers the necessary background information but also arouse their curiosity.Besides,time travel enables Cora to witness the African American's life experience in the antebellum South and postbellum South.Through Cora's time travel,Whitehead suggests that racial discrimination may still exist in modern society.Besides,focalization gives readers more aspects to understand this novel.Chapter Five is the conclusion of this whole paper.