Gender Identity Interpretation On The Blind Assassin From The Perspective Of Feminist Narratology

For her pioneering writing techniques and strong sense of social responsibility,Margaret Atwood is famous in the world literature and reputed as “the queen of Canadian literature”.The Blind assassin,Atwood’s tenth novel,won the Man Booker Prize,the Commonwealth’s most prestigious prize for fiction,in 2000,which attracted numerous scholars’ investigation of it from the perspective of ethical criticism,identity issues,women’s studies,post-modern criticism,narrative strategies and so on.The novel owns an exquisite narrative structure,with four narrative layers interlocking each other in virtuality and reality.Moreover,its continual conversions of different focalizations and voices make the issues of gender identities even more noteworthy.Nevertheless,most scholars have so far focused on the narrative focalizations and voices in the novel,ignoring the close connection between narrative focalizations and voices and the characters’ gender identities.Thus,few critics have analyzed the construction of gender identities from narrative focalizations and voices,let alone examined the alienation and construction of male identity and harmonious gender identities reflected in the novel reflected in the novel.Given the situation,as an advanced theory of post-classical western narratology,feminist narratology can provide effective and easy-to-grasp guiding principles for the analyses of multiple narrative focalizations and voices,as well as the interpretation of gender identities.Therefore,from the perspective of feminist narratology,the current study employs narrative focalization,narrative voice and free indirect discourse in this theory to explore the issues of gender identities in the novel.First of all,it examines the relationship between six modes of narrative focalizations and gender identities.Then,from the perspective of various narrative focalizations,it analyzes the otherization of female and male characters’ identities.Secondly,it investigates the relationship between two narrative voices and gender identities,and then studies the reconstruction of female and male characters’ identities by different narrative voices.Finally,it discusses the relationship between the harmonious gender identities and the conversions of narrative focalizations and voices,as well as the construction of harmonious gender identities by the shifting narrative focalizations and voices,revealing Atwood’s special view of gender politics in the novel.In conclusion,on the one hand,the present research can reflect the identities issues of both sexes of the novel in a more comprehensive and detailed way,and make up for the one-sidedness and singleness of other studies in the analysis of gender politics in the literary texts.On the other hand,it also reveals Atwood’s concept of harmonious gender politics,providing some useful suggestions for solving the anxiety of gender identities and pursuing freedom and equality to human beings nowadays.