Abstract
In this article, we have focused on the narrative features and cinematic techniques of Bharati Mukherjee’s short story “The Management of Grief” to examine the construction of identity in “the thir...
Highlights
Bakhtin’s chronotope and Mukherjee’s home For Bakhtin, social life is dialogical, or multi-vocal, involving two or more voices
“only one language is present in the utterance, but it is rendered in the light of another language” (Bakhtin, 1981, p. 362)
The difference in age (Shaila’s grandmother and her parents or Kusum and her daughter, Pam), gender and race (Indian, Canadian, Irish) represent a plurality of conflicting moral and ideological stances in the dialogic perspective structure of “The Management of Grief.”. These different ideological perspectives in the world of narration resemble the conflicting and discrepant worldviews present in our contemporary globalized world where massive immigration and movement around the globe have forced people with diverse cultural backgrounds live together. These opposing voices are bound with specific time and space which refer to the three negotiating chronotopes of the homeland, the host country and the third space
Summary
Immigration, transnational and transcultural relationships comprise our reality. The culture and identity of the people living in diasporic communities, are of interest to both critics and writers. Bharati Mukherjee, as a writer of the Indian diaspora, in her fiction, in general, and in “The Management of Grief,” in particular, is concerned with these borderline identities. There is an attempt to analyze such hybrid identities according to Mikhail Bakhtin’s concept of Chronotope, an aesthetic way of presenting human beings in relation to their temporal and spatial world. Immigrants, living in diaspora, are living in the third space where they create a new identity and a new culture for themselves, separate and different from the culture of the homeland and that of the host country.
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