Reconstruction of Brain Text: The Initiation of Celestial in an American Marriage

Abstract

Against the backdrop of the American mass incarceration system, Tayari Jones An American Marri age reveals, through the epistolary narratives of the African American couple Roy and Celestial, the mechanism by which the double violence of race and gender disciplines individual choices. Based on brain text theory, this paper focuses on the content of Celestial s letters and analyzes how the letters serve as a material carrier of “perceptions and cognitions stored in the brain”, externalizing the character s psychological trauma and demonstrating the process of brain text reconstruction. Celeste’s choic e of abortion exposes the dilemma of African American women in terms of bodily autonomy and racial stigmatization. Her brain text undergoes a threefold reconstruction: first, she re examines the dilemma of race and gender from the perspective of reality; s econd, she completes the rational choice of abortion through the game of rights in marriage; and finally, she realizes self reconciliation. Jones sublimates the individual narrative into a critique of the white dominant system through the epigraph, reveali ng the interpretive potential of brain text theory in decoding the structural violence in the United States, and providing an innovative research perspective for the study of African American literature.