| Summary: | 碩士 === 高雄師範大學 === 英語學系 === 98 === My thesis inspects the fictional, Vietnamese cook Bình’s life in 27 rue de Fleurus in Paris with Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas in Monique Truong’s awarded novel The Book of Salt. By narrating his ample sensational experiences and racial, sexual, and class alienation, Bình presents the intricacy of exile and (post)colonial articulation.
In five chapters the thesis explores respective but connective issues of The Book of Salt. Chapter One introduces choices of terms and outlines the main idea and the structure of this thesis. Chapter Two differentiates similar practices between the main characters in order to explore their mentalities by virtue of their perspectives on the “in-between, language acts, and the essence of, as well as their bodily performativity in, their displacement, while Chapter Three is devoted to the signification of wine and salt, locating particularly the resistance and transgression which they raise through the nature and imagination that entails. Chapter Four draws attention to details—mutilation and quotation, for instance—in The Book of Salt that contributes to theorizing authenticity, its positioning, limited openness, and the significance to a traveler. Chapter Five concludes my thesis with the eternity of difference and the necessity of authenticity, expecting that reading The Book of Salt will inspire a new cultural and individual subjectivity out of ambiguous identifications in the contemporary era.
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