Narrating a Nation into Being: On Michael Ondaatje's Deviant Narrative Strategy in Running in the Family

doi:10.30395/WSR.202506_18(2).0005

淡江大學機構典藏 > 外國語文學院 > 英文學系 > 期刊論文 > Item 987654321/129372

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题名:	Narrating a Nation into Being: On Michael Ondaatje's Deviant Narrative Strategy in Running in the Family
其它题名:	敘述一個國家的存在：論麥可．翁達傑在《世代相傳》中的特異敘事策略
作者:	Wu, Kai-su
关键词:	Running in the Family;the Burgher people;Homi Bhabha;nation-building;narrative;poetics/politics debate
日期:	2025-06-15
上传时间:	2026-07-06 12:05:22 (UTC+8)
出版者:	國立政治大學英國語文學系
摘要:	Michael Ondaatje's Running in the Family (1982) is often regarded as a fictionalized memoir or auto/biographical fiction that transcends generic conventions. The narrative voice in the book engages the reader by weaving together diverse stories related to Ondaatje's family history in Ceylon/Sri Lanka. The book records the life ("bios") of his people as much as it is invested in his gesture of fragmentary writing ("graphy"). As argued in the article, this latter effort by Ondaatje, embodied in his employment of episodic and sometimes incomplete narrative to reproduce the transient and meandering nature of recollection on both parts of himself and the others, questions the imperative of foregrounding manifest historical accounts in an immigrant writer's text, such as the British divide-and-rule policy in colonial Ceylon and the 1971 insurrection in postcolonial Sri Lanka. Ondaatje calls for a collective self-storytelling that coordinates the seemingly bifurcated personal and political aspects in such a way that the convergence of scandals, gossips, familial archives, and oneiric accounts enacts a dialogic performance. Ondaatje is both conscious of the unreachability of the truth from the outset and is conscientious about presenting the book as expressive of the Burgher people's communal achievement, which counterbalances the nationalist narrative of history dominated by the Sinhalese and the Tamil. Drawing on Homi Bhabha's discussion of nation and narration, this article suggests reading the memoir as inscribing an aesthetic creation of the narrative process on the histories of the multi-ethnic people in the writer's imaginary homeland.
關聯:	The Wenshan Review of Literature and Culture 18(2), p.119-153
DOI:	10.30395/WSR.202506_18(2).0005
显示于类别:	[英文學系] 期刊論文

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