Narrator's Speech And Character's Consciousness Presentation In Stream-of-Consciousness Fiction

Is there any clear demarcation line between narrator's speech and character's consciousness presentation in stream-of-consciousness fiction? If there is,when does character's consciousness presentation begin? How do stream-of-consciousness writers present character's consciousness? And when does character's consciousness presentation comes to an end? If there is no clear border between them,why do they have overlaps? What are the overlaps? And what are the impacts of the overlaps on stream-of-consciousness fiction?To answer these questions,pure explanation of the content of text and the abstract meaning behind is untenable because they are often of high subjectivity.Instead,the switch of point of view between the narrator's and the character's has to be taken into consideration.The thesis is designed to conduct a synchronic study on the linguistic form of stream-ofconsciousness fiction.During the process,grammatical units of the fiction including vocabulary,phrase,sentence,paragraph,as well as section and chapter are discussed;and the main factors which function as signals of the change in point of view including person,tense,and locution are analyzed based on the grammatical units they belong to.The research shows that when there is clear demarcation line between narrator's speech and character's consciousness presentation,the changes in basic tense,person,and locution of the text signal the beginning of character's consciousness,and the return of them also signal that the character's consciousness comes to a pause and the narrator's speech continues again.Nonetheless,exceptions are unavoidable such as the person concord in first-person text,and impersonal reportive description with no obvious change in tense and grammatical coherence with the context.The exceptions are the cases when there are overlaps between narrator's speech and character's consciousness presentation,the overlaps not only meet the requirements of grammatical structure and the balance among grammatical elements of English language,but also manage to help stream-of-consciousness writers convey character's inner reality more naturally and convincingly within the limits of linguistic features.In addition,the research method of this thesis is determined to provide inspirations for the study of narratology in terms of story and discourse: based on the theory of narratology,the thesis has applied textual analysis skills of synchronic linguistics to stream-of-consciousness fiction,and the process of the switch between narrator's speech and character's consciousness presentation is thus represented by the arrangement and change of grammatical elements.