The Unnatural Narrative And Anti-discourse Practice In Erdrich’s The Night Watchman

Louise Erdrich is an American Indian author whose novel The Night watchman(2020)focuses on Patrice Paranteau,who travelled to the city in search of her sister(Vera),and Thomas Wazhashk,a chairman of the Turtle Mountain Indian Tribe,who led the Indian tribesmen in their fight against the No.108 bill aiming to exterminate the Indian Nation.This novel won the Pulitzer Prize for Literature in 2021.The unnatural narrative is both a narrative element in this novel and a way of presenting the novel’s meanings and artistic technique.This paper intends to analyze the unnatural narrative in The Night Watchman by the use of Jan Alber and Brian Richardson’s theory of unnatural narratology and discourse-related theories,with the aim of analyzing the novel’s unnatural characters and unnatural events to find out the Indian nation’s anti-colonial discursive demands and its discursive deconstruction of colonialism and racism,as well as to explore how Erdrich used unnatural narrative to recreate a world distorted and whitewashed by the discourse of European immigrants,and how she constructed Indian discursive fields in literature to break through and counter the encirclement and hegemony of Western discourse.By using unnatural narratives as a counter-discursive practice of minority discourse in her novel,Erdrich fulfilled the mission of literature to give voice to minority discourse.The thesis consists of five main sections.The introductory part introduces the life and literary works of Louise Erdrich,the reasons for choosing the topic of this thesis,the current state of research on Erdrich’s works abroad and the current state of translation and research in China,the significance of this topic,the research method and the innovation points of this thesis.The first chapter takes the unnatural characters in The Night Watchman as the object of study,and analyzes the discursive demands of the Indian people’s self-talk contained in the unlikely characters of Roderick,the Indian ghost,the talking dog,the dog with an inner monologue,and the tribal shaman who can have an out-of-body experience.The novel retells the history of colonial oppression of the Indian people through the mouth of Roderick and uncovers the brutal colonial atrocities committed by European American immigrants against the Indian people.The talking dog and the dog with an inner monologue reveal the real existence of the Indian people in American society,tell the plight of individual Indians,and talk about the racial violence and the trauma left behind by the Indians.The shaman reveal the U.S.government’s policy of racial division against Indians,and the unnatural power of his tribal rituals represent the collective spirit of Indian tribes,which is an affirmative demonstration of the cohesiveness of Indian nations.At the same time,this unnatural power had a real impact on reality,breaking through the discourse of American nationalism and racism against Indian nations to a certain extent.In summary,Erdrich uses the mouth of the unlikely unnatural figures to speak out the repressed national discourse of Indians in reality instead of the originally "silent" Indian nation.The second chapter focuses on the unnatural events in The Night Watchman.Firstly,the dream world in which Patrice,Vera,and their mother communicated with each other,shows the close interpersonal ties of the Indian tribes,which resists the American relocation plan to divide the Indian tribes and the hegemonic discourse of white European domination.Secondly,we analyze the myth of the creation of the muskrat in the novel,which replaces the white human God of creation in Western mythology with the muskrat,showing the Indians’ reaffirmation of land ownership and their revision of the Western creation discourse,trying to break the cornerstone and legitimacy of the European white discourse of land grabbing.Lastly,the world of animism shown in the novel will be analyzed.In the Indians’ view,everything has a soul,there is no heaven or afterlife,and the soul remains in the world after the death of life.The third chapter reads the unnatural narratives in The Night Watchman carefully to analyze the anti-colonial discourse embedded in them and to explore how Erdrich uses unnatural narratives to construct Indian national discourse.The first part is based on the role of unnatural narratives in the novel as "Description".Through the mouths of the unnatural characters,Erdrich questions and refutes the Western discourse.By the use of unnatural narratives,she constantly denies the discourse of white Europeans and reveals the conflict between the two sides and the Indian nation’s sense of resistance through its narrative tension in order to dismantle the authority of the Western discourse and regain the Indian’s lost discourse under the colonial discourse.The second part explores the "foregrounding" function of the unnatural narrative in the novel.Erdrich uses unnatural narratives to expose the various acts of colonial plunder,racial discrimination,and extermination by the colonists contrasts the "concealed" crimes of the colonists in reality with the "overly visible" racial oppression in the unnatural narratives,highlighting the irony of American colonialism and racism,and the resistance discourse of Indian nations.Lastly,this paper explores the "dialogue" function of the unnatural narrative in this novel.Indian repressed memories,erased history and rewritten myths enter the novel’s discourse system as narrative symbols,constituting intertextuality and dialogue with the mainstream Western discourse,giving the narrative discourse subversive and revolutionary power,and realizing the reconstruction of the Indian discourse field and the self-empowerment of their discourse.The unnatural narrative allows Indians to compete for discourse in dialogue with Western discourse,and to self-express and construct their traditional culture,subject identity,and sense of autonomy in the process of dialogue.The fourth chapter focuses on the characteristics of the unnatural narrative and its discursive connotations in The Night Watchman,and digs into its unique narrative characteristics and philosophical connotation.The unnatural narrative is anti-traditional,anti-conventional and anti-authority,which often produces unusual reading experiences and artistic effects,and contains meaningful philosophical discourse.Firstly,the artistic effect of strangeness is that unnatural characters and unnatural events challenge the "conventional world" whitewashed by Western discourse and to expose the irrationality and injustice in the "normality" suppressed by the mainstream discourse.Secondly,the unnatural narrative tends to demythologize the world of the story,questioning the logosophical discourse that has long held a monopoly in the West,dismantling the hegemony of scientific and rational discourse through unknowability,and attempting to destroy the West’s discursive supremacy over Indian peoples.Finally,the embedding of the unnatural narrative in The Night Watchman negates the traditional Western essentialist discourse and dissolves discrimination and antagonism in terms of race,gender,and class by eliminating absolute reality and clear demarcation.The conclusion part is a summary and sublimation of the whole thesis.The unnatural narrative in The Night Watchman constitutes a subversion of the hegemonic discourse of European immigrants and a dismantling of their discursive authority.Under the unnatural narrative,history is retold,truth is revealed,and discourse is transformed,on the basis of which Erdrich constructs the discourse of the Indian nation.Beneath the veneer of unnatural characters and unnatural events,the cultural traditions,spiritual beliefs,and sense of national self-reliance of the Indian people are recalled and discovered.With the storytelling,Erdrich constructs the Indian discourse field in the Western-dominated discourse system through the unnatural narrative,carries out Indian self-talk,constructs Indian subjectivity,and reveals the strength and vitality of Indian culture.The unnatural narrative provides Erdrich with the means and space for counter-discourse,and Erdrich also injects new vitality and unique national and contemporary characteristics into the unnatural narrative.Through unnatural narratives,Erdrich endeavors to resolve the unequal relationship between majority and minority,marginal and central discourses in the discourse system,realizing literature’s mission of giving voice to minority and disadvantaged discourses.Erdrich’s works not only provide the academic community with a research perspective to critique modernity from a postcolonial perspective,but also provide reference and inspiration for the counter-discourse practice and development of minority discourse literature,and promote the development of cultural exchange and cognitive pluralism in world literature through the promotion of Indian literature.In summary,Erdrich is undoubtedly an excellent writer with worldwide significance.