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The Narrative Techniques In Hemingway's Fiction

Posted on:2004-03-27Degree:DoctorType:Dissertation
Country:ChinaCandidate:W ZhangFull Text:PDF
GTID:1115360122465524Subject:Comparative Literature and World Literature
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Considerable thorough achievements at home and abroad have been on Ernest Hemingway, the 20th century American novelist . However, they are rather narrow and not broad in research fields with some uncovered room to be studied, for instance, Hemingway received his Noble Prize of Literature for "his mastery of the art of modern narration". With a great regret, I find few researches have been done on this greatest contribution Hemingway made with only few short essays. This dissertation intends to focus on this topic, to explore the exquisite techniques of the narrative modes, narrative time, narrative situations and narrative voices in Hemingway's novels in details with arratological point of view. I propose that Hemingway utilizes two types of narrative modes: in the novels with strong man characters the mode is that the protagonist fails or dies in his struggle to overcome the barriers to realize his wishes, but his immortal spirit remains. Jn other novels, its mode manifests that the protagonist lives an uncomfortable life and intends to change it but with little effort and remains the drab situation. In the expression of these two modes, Hemingway applies with freedom and smoothness five narrative structures: the cause-effect linear structure, the circular covering structure, the mixed patch structure, the knitted corresponding structure, and the psychological structure of stream of consciousness. Hemingway understands deeply the minute impact of the narrative time on the narration, and manoeuvres reasonably the relationship between the narrative time and the time of the story with the techniques like sequential narration, inner flashback, outer flashback, partial flashback, total flashback, direct pre-narration and indirect pre-narration, which manifest the variations of narrative time sequences. With the unbalanced time, he constructs four time spans as ellipses, abstracts, scenes and pauses. He reforms the narrative frequency to form narrative rhythms with changeable speeds. Hemingway differs from other novelists in that he exposes the stories instead of speaking with little subjectivity and more objectivity. To diversify the narrative techniques, he changes the author's narrative situations, the first person narrative situation and character's narrative situation, to intermingle the zero focus, the inner focus and the outer focus to reach a multi-angles perspective net. The narrative voices in Hemingway's novels are, for one time, single, for other time, multi-voices with those of the real author, implied author, narrator, and characters. He manages the hard and soft voices as per the needs of his works. As Hemingway pursues the objective narrative effects, he stresses on the characters' voices and weakens the narrator's voice, especially and more obviously the novels of the stream of consciousness and dialogue to use more absent narration to manifest the characters. But he imposes on the author's voice with meta-narration to express his own views of art and life.Hemingway's narrative techniques overpass those of his predecessors, imposing the American native styles with some modernist techniques, which get him on the leading role of his contemporary writers. Confronting the strong European fictional tradition, he challenges, reforms and remolds the lengthy, drab, slow and monotonous narrative modes. He reforms the narrative techniques, rhythms and styles with an overall operation. He cuts the omnipotent narrative situations and adds the characters' narrative situations and the inner focus, cuts the lengthy statements and adds ellipses, cuts the typical situations and adds more characters and stories. Thus the more free, more direct and more diversified narration to invent a simple and forceful narrativeart. Hemingway's narrative techniques have influenced the whole world greatly, with numerous writers accepting and imitating him as a master of narrative art. This dissertation has the breakthrough in that, first of all, the previous researches lacking in theories and unifi...
Keywords/Search Tags:Hemingway, Fiction, Narrative Techniques
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