A Narratological Analysis Of The Narrator's Intervention In Middlemarch

Middlemarch: A Study of Provincial Life,the masterpiece of the British novelist George Eliot in the 19 th century,is a novel with many characters,many plots and many points of view,which has been acknowledged as a turning point in the history of novels in European literature.The novel was published in the Blackwood's Magazine from 1871 to1872,with 86 chapters in serialization.However,when the serialization began,the novel hadn't actually been completed.Only 33 chapters was written.It can be said that large part of the content of the novel was created in the course of serialization.But the tremendous difficulty did not prevent George Eliot from creating literary and sales wonders.For more than 140 years,the researchers have endeavored to discover the mystery of the unity of the seemingly disparate parts.This thesis holds that the narrator's intervention in the gigantic book Middlemarch plays a decisive role in the construction of its central theme,its characters,its unified structure,and in the conveyance of moral and ethical values through novel-reader interaction and of its aesthetic standard.In Middlemarch,readers can perceive that the author utters her voice in various forms through the narrator's mouth,intervening constantly,and skillfully arranging and commenting on the structure of the novel,the characters and events.Generally speaking,in the past,the narrator's intervention was considered to destroy the natural development of the story and was often questioned and criticized by critics.However,in the light of narrative theory,the seemingly serious comments are not irrelevant to the story,but they are an effective narrative strategy the author conceived to realize all her purposes in writing: to connect the serialized parts thematically,structurally and aesthetically,to disseminate her religion of humanity with sympathy at its centre,and to experiment with writing a novel with multiple characters,plots and points of view,a new form European writers had never tried before.This thesis attempts to systematically study the forms of the narrator's intervention frequently present in Middlemarch under the guidance of the narrative theory,focusing on how to construct a network-like narrative structure to accommodate many details with thesame theme;how to construct multiple point of view structure to achieve comprehensive understanding of the characters' behavior and the psychology;how to spread Victorian moral values in the narration of the story;how to sell the serialized novel together with the magazine where the novel was published successfully,and how to sell the theoretical ideas of creating a new novel like Middlemarch.The study reveals that these forms of the narrator's intervention in Middlemarch fully demonstrate the pioneering and visionary nature of the novel in its narrative form.Inspired by scientific knowledge,this 19 th century novel published while it was being written displays the great narrative potential of the narrator's intervention in experimenting with the narrative characteristics of post-modern novels,such as network-like narrative structure and multiple point of view structure.In this way,the novel is written on the border,possessing a dual structure-telling stories and telling how to write them.Theoretically speaking,Middlemarch narrator's intervention constructs and defends the legitimacy of the identity of the novel and of the narrator with its revolutionary edge,which overthrows the general understanding of the narrator's border-crossing in the novels,especially in the serialized novels like Middlemarch as destructive.