On The Narrative Skills In Katherine Mansfield's Short Stories

Katherine Mansfield was an excellent novelist in the early 20th century. With her vivid, graceful, and humorous language, as well as her many fabulous short stories, she became a very important figure in the history of British short novels. Mansfield drew on many modernistic writing skills in her short-novel creation,and made an innovative contribution to the development and maturity of the modern short novels. In the traditional study of Mansfield, researchers pay more attention on the chronological description which tends often to rely on purely biographical material and on modernism features, such as stream of consciousness, plotless, symbolism and so on. While this thesis stresses on focalization, narrative distance and anachronies by employing various theories based on narratology along with the artistic effects through the study of examples in the short stories of Mansfield.First, based on Genette and Bal, internal focalization, external focalization and double focalization in Mansfield's short stories are analyzed in examples. The employment of focalization enables the readers to see the souls of the characters and shortens or lengthens the distance between the readers and the characters. Then narrative distance is discussed from the aspect of mimesis (imitation) as well as the aspect of free indirect discourse which greatly let the readers go inside the heart of the characters. Furthermore another remarkable feature of Mansfield's stories, her flexible manipulation of narrative time is studied. Some of her successful works do not follow time sequence but in the order of anachonies, which she begins with a certain present time and then makes the story time go back and forward around the present time and at last comes to the present again like a circle. In this way a comic static atmosphere can be created and the complex inner activities of the characters can be revealed.In a word, with all her innovative writing techniques, Mansfield made great contributions to the development of short stories.