| Summary: | 碩士 === 國立高雄師範大學 === 英語學系 === 101 === Abstract
Few novelists like Marguerite Duras made success twice by reproducing her first best-seller, as well as one of her autobiographical novels, The Lover, into The North China Lover. Both are based on the period of her life experiences which was thought of as an exotic, traumatic, and depressed journey in Indochina. Due to the change of the narrative form, The North China Lover creates the possibility to explore whether there is the development between Duras herself and “the child” in the story. This thesis attempts to present the fluidity of the self—the protagonist “the child” who is, to a great extent, Duras herself in The North China Lover—in terms of diaspora.
This thesis is divided into four chapters. Chapter One is intended to introduce the diaspora theory and the theoretic points of Lacan’s mirror stage so as to make clear the exploration of the suffering that those characters bear as a result of being the Other through the Other’s gaze. Chapter Two aims to center on diasporic clues in The North China Lover and to apply diaspora to reveal the real self image of the child and other main characters in this novel. Also, the diasporic self of those characters could be seen through others’ gaze or witnessing in the Lacanian mirror stage, which facilitates the explanation of the pain of being the other in the hostland. In Chapter Three, the main focus is on the traumatic sexual encounter of the child. The twisted and complicated relationship with other main characters of the opposite and the same sex further combine to represent her ambivalent self image in the hostland. Chapter Four is the conclusion, dedicated to discussing the intertwined self-other relationship between Duras herself and “the child” in The North China Lover and to working to discuss the process of Duras’s return as a diasporic being. The return means not just the home-coming back to France, but also the spiritual placement by writing this autobigraphical novel.
Keywords: Marguerite Duras, Diaspora, Mirror Stage, Self, the Other
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