This project has aimed to add a level of plurality to the reading of the novel Tracks. By deconstructing the characters of Pauline, Nanapush and Fleur, it has argued that each character paradoxically stands both as a testament of colonialism and resistance. The plurality found in the novel brings forth several liberating elements. First, it does not negate the oppressive colonial experience of each character, but it does bring to the surface that each of them also stands in defiance to the sign that they shoulder. As such, the lives of the three fictitious characters illustrated in Tracks, also stand as “a national culture [made up of] the whole body of efforts made by a people” (Fanon 188) resulting in the postcolonial literary movement. Secondly, this defiance also effects the novel, because it changes its intention of being a narrative on colonialism. What was meant to be a narrative of oppression also stands as an allegory of resistance resulting in a narrative that eloquently betrays itself. Lastly, and perhaps most importantly, a post-structuralist reading of Tracks also challenges the authoritarian notion that “reading is natural and transparent [and that] the signifier [is] the sober partner of the signified” (Barthes qtd. in Selden et al. 149). Deconstruction makes allowance for questioning signs and their signifiers, so that even the act of reading becomes an act of resistance because it rejects historical institutions that have been normalised, and in the case of Tracks, we end up with a narrative that eloquently asserts and betrays itself.
Godkänt datum 2021-01-17