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
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,