A Study On Narrative Strategy In Possession

A.S.Byatt is a world renowned critic and writer. Her identity both as a critic and a writer offers her masterpiece which has many different narrative perspectives, enabling Byatt to write novels that display her considerable expertise in narrative technique and in-depth insight into contemporary academic world. Her masterpiece: Possession:A Romance (1990) is a good example.The Booker Prize winning:Possession:A Romance (1990) has been hailed as a successful novel. Many critics have studied this work from different perspectives such as feminism, archetypal criticism and symbolism. Some of them pushed into the study on the narrative strategies of the novel Possession, and the study has helped to obtain the profound insight into this novel. Others paid attention to Byatt's narrative techniques and tried to shed light on her unique historical concept. Yet few critics have focused on the embedded narrative texts in Possession or have studied it deeply until now.The paper attempts to analyze Genette's narrative strategies in Possession based on Genette and Mieke Bal's narrative theory in order to reveal how Byatt's narrative strategy serves to develop her historical concept. This paper is made up of three chapters. The First Chapter discusses the overall structure of Possession and tells three stories which happen in different historical periods; the Second Chapter focuses on the third person omniscient narrative intervention and analyzes three plots in the novel; the Last Chapter explains the irregular narrative time in Possession based on Genette's theory of order, duration and frequency.