Narrative Prospects In Double Directions: The Study On The Narrative Art Of The French Lieutenant's Woman

Among western scholars, The French Lieutenant's Woman, adopting a wholly viewpoint and quite contemporary techniques, is a romance in Victorian times. But for Chinese scholars, it is a typical meta-fiction of postmodernism literature. This novel owns an extraordinary meaning for our study, for its special narrative techniques have brought a new path into western narrative literature that always seeks a breakthrough in its art. Generally, as far as domestic and overseas researches on it are concerned, subjective study and narrative art study make up the major part of them. Mostly, the former aims at unearthing the meaning of Existentialism, Feminism and old or new Historicism. The latter mainly centers on the part such as three open finales, the character of meta-fiction and the structure of parody. However, such studies about narrative art have little deepness into the unique narrative technique of novel itself, though they have made a great contribution for explaining the innovation and oddity of postmodernism literature.Based on the above deficiency, in this paper the dissertation mainly covers three parts as following: narrative focus, narrative structure and Verfremden technical. On basis of those researches, this paper, from the view point of Western narrative literature, probes into the unique narrative skills of The French Lieutenant's Woman through comparing the novel with western classical literature, realism literature and modernism literature.As far as narrating focus is concerned, the writer won't agree with some scholars who holds that the novel's innovation lies in using variable prospects of omnicience, character, outsider look-on and multi-compound because it cannot explain the novel's uniqueness thoroughly. Unscrambling its innovation from focus of narration, the author maintains that the novel doesn't exclude the narrative focus of zero, which dominates western traditional narrative literature. Also, it uses a special strategy which activated another narrative focus: the author's focus of critic and information exchange, and so the strategy embodies the narrative idea of postmodernism. Such focus' use in novel not only removes the dominant status of zero focus in western traditional narrative literature, but has the novel shown itself in double prospects of tradition and postmodernism.The second part is to put emphasis on the narrative structure. Comparing with modernistic and earlier narrative literature, the structure of The French Lieutenant's Womanshows a special integrity of traditional narrative structure which hides a structural fragmentation. The special structure indicates itself in one way as a two-tier integrity and fragmentation feature of surface plot and deep metonymy. Additionally, another difference is that the novel's structure breaks up the duality of traditional novels whose characteristics are linearity metonymy structure and extensity metaphor structure. In this way, The French Lieutenant's Woman hides the metaphor structure under the surface metonymy structure.In part three, the paper makes a main study on Verfremden technique. Just based on the above special narrative technique, two narrative styles are demonstrated: traditional narrative style and postmodernism narrative style, which exist in the same text. The former is to be against- Verfremden when it refers to readers' pre-understanding structure, and keeps the traditional narrative mode up. As for the latter, the innovation of narrative strategy brings readers into a fresh appreciation field, which is going to eliminate automatic programs of traditional narration, so an artistic effect in reading is produced. After all, for the reader, this novel presents a dual effect of Verfremden and against-Verfremden with the above narrative styles.According to researches on the above three sides of narrative technique, the paper draws a conclusion that the narrative art of The French Lieutenant's Woman is actually a deconstruction strategy instead of a seemingly simulation of traditional narration. It is the innovation of old narrati...