Narrative Tension: On The Narrative Techniques Of Toni Morrison's Latest Novel A Mercy

This thesis applies narratology to analyze Morrison's latest novel A Mercy to discuss how did she conceive the beautiful, untamed, lawless world that was America in the seventeenth century, revealing the unique artistic charm of her novel.The thesis is consist of six parts. The first part is introduction of the writer and the structure of the thesis. The second part is mainly discuss Narrative Perspective, which including narrative person and narrative focalization. Novel uses both the first person narrator and the third person narrator, embodies intense artistic charm and makes the whole novel more real, objective and abundant by employing postmodernism. The author adopts both internal and external focalization narrative model which unfold some vivid story pictures for readers as well as revealing the character's inner world, besides, it highlights the theme of the novel. The third part, which discusses time in the three aspects of order, duration and frequency. The novel doesn't arrange in chronological order but uses flashback and describes separately instead. it rearranges the text time according to the psychological process of the characters as well as having an appropriate level of detail with a purpose of shaping the character much better. The frequency and duration have a direct influence on rhythm. Generally speaking, the rhythm of the novel is slow. The main reason is due to repeated narrative. The scene of Jacob's taking Florence away has been narrated for three times. The fourth part analyses the changing narrative discourse. Gerard Genette, a famous literary theorist from France has distinguished three types of ways by which expressed people's spoken word and the inner discourse. They are narrative discourse, indirect narrative discourse and the dramatic narrative discourse. They obtain different artistic effect and not only expand the time and space of the novel from every point of view but also deepen the theme of the novel. The fifth part explores the charm of the novel from the angle of rhetorical devices. The vision is vivid by using a large number of symbol and metaphor.The last part concludes Morrison's narrative tension and discusses how she uses ingenious narrative skills to deepen the topic and to attract the readers.