| IntroductionDoris Lessing is one of the most important post-war writers in English. Up to now, she has created more than forty novels and short story collections and has been awarded dozens of awards and prizes including Somerset Maugham Award and French Prix Medicis for Foreigners. Ingenious innovation as well as the excellent traditions of the nineteenth-century literature can be traced in her works.In her early works, themes are mainly developed through the description of the protagonist's experiences. Then from the 1960s, she began to write, in her own terms, "inner space fiction", in which she attempted to employ the "psychological realism" techniques to reflect the reality by digging into the effects of society on individuals so as to express her own concerns about the society, the times and the fate of individuals. The attempts are well represented in her short story To Room Nineteen, which is the reason why I choose it as the basis of my thesis.In this paper, I will analyze the narrator, the perspective, the functions of the narrator and the ways of speech and thought presentation in To Room Nineteen through adequate illustrations from the angle of narratology.Chapter One The Narrator in To Room NineteenThe narrator is the teller of a narrative text, representing the so-called "voice". The narrator is a function rather than a persona, but for the convenience of discussion, I will still refer to the narrator as "he". Any narrative text is narrated by at least one narrator, without whom the narrative text may not exit. Due to thenarrator's importance, this chapter focuses on his type and the perspective in To Room Nineteen.Narrators are divided into different types in narratological studies. The analyses of this chapter show that the narrator in To Room Nineteen is a heterodiegetic/ non-character, overt and reliable one. When discussing the narrator, we have to take into account the narrative perspective. The narrative perspective answers the question of "who sees" the characters and events as they are described to us. Gerard Genette, in his Narrative Discourse, first distinguishes narrative voice from narrative perspective and points out that sometimes they are not united in one narrator. He generalizes three types of narrative situations, i.e., zero, external and internal focalization. Though the narrative voice comes from a heterodiegetic/ non-character narrator, the perspective is from within the story. In other words, third-person internal perspective is taken in To Room Nineteen. The narrator penetrates fully into Susan's psychology from her perspective to increase the suspense, regulate the narrative distance and arouse the reader's sympathy for her.Chapter Two The Functions of the Narrator in To Room NineteenThe narrator serves various functions in a narrative text. In To Room Nineteen, the narrator mainly serves the functions of narrating, persuading, intervening and manipulating the narrative speed.The narrator's function of narrating is obvious. It is through his narration that a bridge is built between the events and characters and the reader; otherwise the reader would have no means to have access to the events and characters. So is his function of persuading. In the first part of the story, he tries to convince the reader that the Rawlings did base their marriage on intelligence. He also exercises his function of intervening to the full extent. Through the change of tenses and thenumerous asides, he comments explicitly or implicitly from time to time either to draw a distance between the character and himself (carrying the reader with him), or to present the contradictory inner world of the protagonist, or to enhance the significance of the work. Meanwhile, through his choice of the events and language, he presents the characters' experiences at a relatively fast speed on the one hand, and gives a minute description to Susan's inner world on the other hand. In this way, he fulfils his function of manipulating the narrative speed.Chapter ThreeThe Presentation of Speech... |
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