The Joy Luck Club: Style 1 key example

Asian storytelling influences come embedded within the story’s structure. Short, fable-like exchanges between an unnamed mother and her daughter serve as prologues to the novel’s four sections. Within individual chapters, narrators weave a wealth of fables and folklore into their accounts. Every character has a story to offer: An-Mei Hsu’s mother shares a tale of turtles who drink human tears, from which magpies happen to hatch. Waverly Jong swears by the wind that aids her during chess matches, just as Ying-Ying quietly submits her wish to the Moon Lady on that fateful night. Lightning strikes small children, and lying girls give birth to winter melons. As each generation furnishes its own layer of fictive inventions upon those that came before, they bring the novel to life. Tan’s reliance on stories adds a refreshing, almost surrealist dimension to her work.

The novel experiments with form and time as well. Characters narrate parts of the story from their own perspective, creating a polyphonic experience in which chapters—like voices—seem to reference and speak with one another. Tan’s use of different narrative perspectives brings an oral tradition onto the page. The stories blend in almost the same way time does, as characters reminisce about their childhoods and dip, trance-like, into the past. Lena St. Clair’s chapter, for instance, peels back multiple timeframes: she revisits her mother’s powers of foresight, a childhood prophecy about marrying a “bad man,” her attempts to “kill” Arnold, and then her growing passion for Harold. Past mingles with present, never having actually disappeared at all. As its characters reckon with their memories, The Joy Luck Club stages a delicate tension between heritage and assimilation, memory and self-invention.