A Stylistic Study Of Narrative Point Of View And Its Pedagogical Implications In The Interpretation Of Literary Discourses

Point of view, as a commonly-used technique of story telling, plays an important part in narration. Since Henry James, an American writer and Flaubert, a French novelist, first manipulated it in their literary works to achieve various rhetorical distances, more and more writers have paid their attention to its application with novel ideas in practice. Now the relevant studies on it have long been a concern in the field of narratology. In recent years, it has also received much attention from stylisticians who have argued that linguistic features contribute a lot to the comprehension of point of view. However, these two schools of scholars have different research emphases. In the former case, point of view is frequently studied in terms of its classification, whereas in the latter, it is explored mainly through the analyses of linguistic features, such as lexis, sentence patterns, persons and tenses.In the perspective of narratology, point of view functions as an adjustment to narrated information and rhetorical distances; while from a stylistic viewpoint, it is embodied by the stances and tones implied by the wording. The former exerts its influence directly on narrative structure and yet the latter indirectly through linguistic features. The current study, taking both cases into consideration, carries out a tentative analysis of Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury to show how these two analytical orientations are combined and reinforced in the revelation of the thematic value and the role of point of view in such an interpretation. It begins with an introduction of a new taxonomy of point of view in the light of Fillmore's pragmatic contextulization, which draws on the comprehensive and critical studies of otherinfluential scholars' similar efforts. Then it goes on to examine the stylistic analytic tools: formal properties, both on inter sentential arid extra sentential levels. Based on these discussions, certain linguistic features are chosen for the major case study. Furthermore, whether statistical data is useful for the analysis or not is also discussed. With all the premises done, a practical case study is presented and the further implications for literature and language teaching are put forward for consideration as well.