| 英文摘要 |
Dreams are a central feature of the extended realism of Ralph Ellison’s second novel, some drafts of which have been published as Three Days Before the Shooting . . . . In this novel, dreams help Ellison’s characters realize or present truths that cannot be presented in the language of straightforward realism. In a quasi- Freudian manner, Ellison’s dream narrations reveal his characters’and novels’most fundamental preoccupations. In this article I analyze part of a dream sequence from Book I of Three Days. This dream, had by a white liberal character, is centered on the figure of an iron groom (or hitching-post boy) who cannot be removed from the doorway to a house. I analyze the construction and function of this dream figure and narrative through the lens of (1) Ellison’s ritualist social criticism, (2) his extended-realist, tragicomic, and syncretic aesthetics, and (3) his allusive and narrative poiesis. The iron groom is constructed as a stereotype of blackness, linked to the major black characters of the novel and to figures in Ellison’s first novel. The groom-as-stereotype is subverted through verbal“signifying”and through the development of a tragicomic narrative rhythm. The dream functions to excavate the dreamer’s (and possibly the reader’s)“self-concealed racism”and to point the way toward what Ellison has called“the mystery of our unity-within-diversity.” |
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