A Way To Epiphany:A Study Of The Narrative Art Of Alice Munro’s Open Secrets

Honored as "Canadian Chekhov",Alice Munro(1931-)was awarded the Nobel Prize of Literature in 2013,cited as "a master of contemporary short story".Open Secrets(1994),Munro’s eighth short-story collection,presents the correlation between time and secret,and the interlacement and fusion of reality and memory in epiphany.Open Secrets was nominated for the 1994 Governor General’s Literary Award for English Fiction and awarded the 1995 WH Smith Literary Award.Studies on Alice Munro’s works can mainly be classified into two categories:feminist theme and narrative techniques.Studies on Open Secrets are still rare at home and abroad,mainly focusing on feminism,stylistics,history and culture.Although some scholars have discussed the "queer bright moment" in one or two stories of Open Secrets,these studies seldom probe into the reader’s role in constructing the textual meaning,and in the meantime these studies lack sufficient analysis of its narrative techniques.Therefore,adopting Gerald Genette’s narrative theory and Wolfgang Iser’s reader-response criticism,this thesis aims to make a further exploration of narrative techniques and the reader’s role in Open Secrets.Based on narrative theory and reader-response criticism theory,this thesis probes into narrative time,narrative focalization,and the reader’s role in Open Secrets,analyzes the openness in Munro’s narrative and its thematic idea about the multiplicity of reality,and simultaneously discusses Munro’s approval for the reader’s constructive activity.In this way,this thesis aims to reveal that in Open Secrets Munro not only applies multiple narrative techniques to present the power of time and the complicity of reality,but also acknowledges the reader’s dynamic role in finding and filling the blank and indeterminacy of text and respectively seeking out a way to epiphany.