Everything I Never Told You Sparknotes

Celeste Ng (1980- ), born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, is regarded as one of the most potential Chinese American writers in contemporary America. Her debut novel Everything I Never Told You, published on June 26, 2014, has gained extensive attention from all over the world. Set in 1970s in a small town named Middlewood, the novel tells a tragic story of an interracial family. Focusing on the issues of race, gender and parent-child relationship, the novel reflects the writer's concern about the social problems existed in America. Although many book reviewers and scholars at home and abroad have studied the novel from different perspectives, they all focus on the analysis of its theme, characters and narrative techniques. This thesis, in an attempt to deepen the exploration of its literary value and social significance, employs Foucault's power discourse theory to analyze the novel from a different angle.
Based on Foucault's power discourse theory, combining the historical background with the textual study of Everything I Never Told
You, this thesis tries to make a detailed study of the dominant discourses in the novel so as to reveal the situations of the disciplined subjects under the dominant discourses.
In the novel, Middlewood is a small panopticon under the control of the ubiquitous power net, and Lee's family are all prisoners living in it. Through the exclusion procedures of prohibition, distinction and repulsion, and the contradiction of truth and falsehood, the dominant positions of patriarchal discourse, Ethnocentric discourse and parental discourse are thus formed. Living under the control and discipline of the dominant discourses, females are confined at home to take care of the family following the rules and norms set by patriarchal discourse, Chinese Americans are discriminated and prejudiced under the observation of the white supremacy, while children are transformed into docile bodies lacking diversity and creativity. However,
just as what Foucault claims, "Where there is power, there is resistance." Dissatisfied with their current situation, all the characters in the novel attempt to break out of the control of the dominant discourses to pursue spiritual freedom and self-salvation. By making partial struggles including breaking the spatial boundary and challenging the rules and norms set by the dominant discourses, the subjected individuals gain themselves the opportunity to speak. Apart from partial struggle, they begin to learn to care for themselves and pay attention to deal with the relationships with others, which is in line with the aesthetics of existence. Through the analysis of the resistant efforts made by the characters in the novel, the thesis attempts to prove that there is still hope for the disciplined subjects to break away from the control of disciplinary power and achieve self-realization and spiritual freedom.
By making an interpretation of discourse, discipline and resistance in Everything I Never Told You, the author tries to reveal that power is ubiquitous and all the individuals are living in a society of discipline. Only by insisting on partial struggles and learning to care of the self can modern people break out of the discipline and achieve spiritual freedom.

Key words：Celeste Ng; Everything I Never Told You; discourse; discipline; resistance