The Narrative Art Of The Awakening

Kate Chopin(1850—1904), born in St. Louis, Missouri, was one of the most prominent women writers in American literature. In her works, she successfully described the life of Creole and Acadian, so she was called the local colorist. She was much interested in disclosing the problems of women's status and their lives frankly and sincerely. She portrayed two types of totally different women, the traditional and the new women in her masterpiece The Awakening.The Awakening, Chopin's greatest literary achievement was published in 1899. But the immediate response to the novel after its publishing was overwhelmingly negative. It aroused great hostility among contemporary reviewers because it traced the psychological and sexual awakening of a young woman. The norms and values preached by Chopin in the novel were in serious conflict with the traditional ones.Her work was banned by many libraries and she was shunned by the loal art club. However, fifty years later, with the development of politics, economy and culture, some critics began to make a new assessment on Kate Chopin's writing, and they thought that she was a forerunner of women's literature and was entitled to an honored position in American literary history.Although critics have done a lot of studies on the novel, most of them have focused on its feminist respects. The special narrative strategies of the novel have attracted people's strong interests, yet few have done thorough research upon it. This thesis attempts to make a relatively thorough analysis of narrative art in perspective of focalization, free indirect speech and symbolism of the novel in the light of narrative theory.Chapter One introduces the background information on Kate Chopin, the novel The Awakening and a general review about the past comments and criticisms on the novel. Chapter Two introduces a skeleton of the basic theoretical ideas and discusses zero focalization, internal focalization with the analysis of three main female characters and free indirect speech which would employ in the novel. Chapter Three focuses upon the important symbol images in the novel. Chapter Four is the conclusion of the thesis.Through the detailed discussion of narrative strategies of The Awakening in terms of focalization free indirect speech and symbolism, the thesis comes to a conclusion that with its delicate narrative strategies which help to deepen the theme as a perfect combination of both rich ideological content and delicate narrative form, The Awakening deserves to be restored and to be given its place among novels worthy of preservation.