The Storyteller: A Study On Shituo's Narrative Strategies

As a writer, whose novels had diversified artistic styles and the complicate application of the narrative skills, Shituo ought not to be neglected and misread in the literary history by the critics. This article goes deep into his novels' artistic pattern, the description methods and his literature theories, evaluating Shituo reasonably in the literary history.Compared with other writers in the same period, the styles of Shituo's novels seemed to be more complicate and more changeful, and the application of the narrative skills to be more delicate. This article tries to use the narrative theories of the literature criticism to study the artistic principles of Shituo and the society- culture contents of his novels. This article pays most attention to the specialties of Shituo's novels in the aspects of point of view, persons, shaping characters and the depiction of a scene. Shituo adopted dual-angle view——though the use of multiple-angle narration was abecedarian at that time, it was one of the earliest polyphonic novels in Chinese novels ;The second person appeared frequently in his novels, he not only inherited the traditional skills of the second person, but also created new rules——to use the second person to break the time-space limit; In the aspects of shaping characters, Shituo consciously searched for regular things which were contained in his characters, he was good at using the individuals to represent the people of that kind, downplaying the particularity of the character in his novels; On the usage of the scene, rate of the appearance of the scene in his novels was far less than in other writers' works of the same period, and this resulted in the style of simplification; Although "the small story" created by Shituo was similar to the "the frame- story" ,they are both the small stories in the novels, but the former had the special features that avoided deviating the story.The writer's personality and society-culture content is the other emphasis in this article. This article tries to correct some critics' misreading of Shituo's novels. The independent literature viewpoints of Shituo was one of the reasons for the diversification of his novels' narrative skills; the other is that Shituo had deep despair in China's reality, and when he wrote his novels, his novels were often checked by the Japanese who controlled Shanghai at that time. These factors made him often use the skills named "generalization" to cover up his despair, making readers not be influenced by the despair.