Collective “We” and the Communal Consciousness of Diaspora Identity in Chang‐rae Lee’s On Such a Full Sea

Abstract

This paper examines how Change‐rae Lee’s On Such a Full Sea imagines a communal consciousness of diaspora identity through the use of a collective narrative voice that creates a narrative sense of split identity in readers’ minds. The novel’s use of heroine figure, Fan, as a locus of communal consciousness very much corresponds to the conventional framework of the Bildungsroman narrative, which builds a communal consciousness incorporated into a progressive history through a depiction of the individual hero’s or heroine’s reconciliation with social norms. The narrative consciousness grounded in this individual hero/heroine invites readers to experience the sense of community congruent with the linear development of history. Lee’s novel, however, complicates the narrative consciousness through a collective narrative voice “we,” by shifting the referent from “we” inside the narrative frame to “we” outside the narrative frame and by dislocating the main figure Fan from society. The sense of disjointedness manifested by the narrative sense of split identity and the heroine’s displacement in society conceptualizes diaspora identity. Diaspora identity configured in this way propounds a more liberating version of communal consciousness as it allows deviations from norms and exploration of new possibilities not bound by nation or ethnicity. The communal consciousness of diaspora identity depicted in Lee’s novel challenges the homogeneous sense of community merged with history and gestures toward heterogeneous deviations from history.