A Narratological Approach To The Self-construction Of Celie In The Color Purple

Alice Walker is one of the eminent African-American women writers.She was born in a family of sharecroppers and grew up in the stage of African-American Civil Rights Movement.The hardship of Walker’s childhood and the experience of political campaign in her youth have become the source of Walker’s creation.Her works mainly aim at uncovering the black woman’s double minority status in America and showing how the black woman empower themselves to triumph over the dual-oppression and move beyond their double minority status.In The Color Purple,she again focuses on how the protagonist gets rid of dual oppression and how she frees herself from dual oppression and becomes an independent black woman.By virtue of narratology,this paper tends to analyze the narrative strategies of the novel,exploring how Walker helps the muted Celie cast the role of narrator and looker,voice out and marginalize the authority of the male and the white.Owing to narrating and looking,Celie’s self-consciousness awakens and Celie grows up into an independent woman.The main body of this thesis can be divided into three chapters in the light of three different narrative strategies in The Color Purple.Chapter one works on the narrative frame of the novel,by virtue of the letter frame,walker endows Celie with the narrative voice.And the change of the narratee indicates the change of Celie’s voice from private to public,ensuring that Celie takes part in the construction of social discourse.Chapter two focuses on two signs in narrative to argue the development of Celie’s selfconsciousness and her private resistance to the white and the black male.Chapter three explores the narrative perspective of the novel.Celie casts herself in the role of observer and narrator,contributing to Celie’s awakening of self-esteem and the realization of independence and ultimate freedom.Form and content serve each other.By analyzing the narrative strategies in the novel,this thesis comes to the conclusion that the narrative strategies Walker uses in The Color Purple serve her for shaping Celie,a black woman changing from submissive,dependent to rebellious,and independent.