Female Identity and Narrative Techniques in Everything I Never Told You

Celeste Ng is a Chinese American novelist who has written several novels mostly dealing with the situation of Chinese immigrants in the United States. Everything I Never Told You is her debut novel, which was published in ۲۰۱۴ and won some prizes. While most studies of this novel focus on the ethnic discrimination of Chinese immigrants in America as represented in this work, this paper focuses on female identity to narratological techniques. It tries to show how notions such as narrative situations and focalization help to portray female identity in the novel. For this purpose, narrative situations and focalization are explained, and their roles in the representation of female identity in the novel are discussed. The role of Ng’s choices of narrators and focalization in observing women is very significant as these choices allow her to consider the lives of the female characters from different angles, especially as regards their behavior in terms of family relations, education, and careers, which are important in shaping women’s identity. In particular, this paper analyzes the way these narrative techniques help reveal the identity of the main female character, Marilyn, in the novel.