Investigating Narratological view of Focalization in Amy Tan’s The Kitchen God’s Wife

Abstract

Genette believes that ‘point of view’ is inadequate to expound the differences between the person who sees and the person who narrates. After years of controversy, he proposes the term ‘focalization’ to clarify this difference. Focalization focuses on the person who sees as a subjective moment of perception. Perceiving can take every character of a novel, to a higher level of subjectivity. Later, Meike Bal added new dimensions to his term. The present study, focuses on Amy Tan’s The Kitchen God’s Wife. Two main characters of the novel are focalizers inside of the story whose insights are revealed through the narrative processes of the events. The internal focalization changeably shifts from mother to daughter and vice versa. This study aims to investigate the concept of character focalizer and narrator focalizer in the light of Gerard Genette’s and Mieke Bal’s narratological theory of focalization. Further, it explores the moments of focalizations of the two characters, Winnie, the mother, and Pearl, the daughter. Focalizing the moment of understanding through the improvement of the complex story is discussed, which helps the two characters reach a higher level of subjectivity to overcome their gap.