DYNAMICS OF DISSONANCE IN ALICE WALKER?S NOVEL ?MERIDIAN?.

Abstract

Abstract

Alice Walker is best known for her fiction about the black women who achieve heroic stature within the confines of their ordinary day-to-day lives. The Afro-American women experienced the pangs of dissension engendered by racism and sexist violence within the community. This paper is primarily based on the selected novel of prolific Pulitzer Prize winner, Afro-American writer, Alice Walker who has explored the dynamics of dissonance plaguing the African-American communities in her works.Walker, whose life was profoundly transformed by her participation in the Civil Rights Movement, does not provide a romantic view of personal, social and political reconciliation and growth but transcends the barriers of gender to more universal concerns of ?individual autonomy, self-reliance and self-realization? in her second novel, Meridian.Through the accounts of the black civil activists, Meridian brings alive the various facets of violence and turbulence the Movement propagated. Meridian, the protagonist, struggles to overcome the paradoxical dissonance between politics and personality and struggles to change the oppressive nature of the society in order to ensure the full development of each individual whether male or female. Meridian’s journey, both the external and internal explorations become an expression of the search for the African-American women’s spirit, a spirit that leads the way for others to follow.