The Spatial Form Of Narrative In The French Lieutenant's Woman

John Fowles was one of the most preeminent English novelists in England. His masterpiece The French Lieutenant's Woman has attracted great attention in academic field since it was published in 1969. The research contents of this novel can be classified into two types, one is thematic study, and the other is narrative study. The former aims at deciphering the novel with French existentialism, feminism, historicism or new historicism, postmodernism, etc., while the latter mainly focuses on narrative techniques, such as collage, anachronism and the intrusive author, but both studies neglect the spatial form under deep narrative structure.By employing spatial form theory to analyze this fiction from a new perspective, this thesis aims at analyzing its deep narrative characteristics of spatial form, exploring the internal relevance between the author's innovative techniques and the novel's theme, and providing a new approach to understand its theme, characters and plots from a new perspective.This thesis consists of five sections.Chapter one is the introduction, which is composed of four parts. The first is the brief introduction about the author and the novel. The second is about the literature review on this fiction. The next is the introduction about the spatial form theory. The last part is the possibility of analyzing the novel with spatial form theory.The second chapter focuses on the spatialized narrative time in this fiction. The suspense or stop of chronological narrative forms a three-dimensional narrative space, in which actions and narrative threads juxtaposed simultaneously together in a space. The spatialized narrative time is analyzed mainly from anachronism, the overlap between story time and narrative time, and nonlinear narrative time.In chapter three, the tree-formed narrative structure is analyzed. One of the remarkable features of this fiction is its multiple endings. The four totally different endings form a spatial form structure, which looks like a tree; meanwhile, much collaged materials also show a tendency of fragmentation and spatialization, which can be taken as leaves of the tree.Chapter four mainly focuses on the analysis of the multi-dimensional focalization. John Fowles adopts various focalizations in this fiction, even with innovative variant of focalization. This chapter is divided into three parts, multi-typed focalizations, multi-layered focalizations, and multiple internal focalizations. By employing multiple focalizations, the images of characters are more full-blown, the three-dimensional space much emphasized, and readers can perceive characters, plots and the motif from different perspectives deeply.In conclusion, it is emphasized again that spatial form provides a new approach to decipher the novel. Readers may comprehend the novel from multiple perspectives and multiple positions. The innovative spatial form and the motif reinforce each other, showing that the author combines perfectly his pursuit of freedom of writing, characters, and readers with the motif of freedom.