Narrative Techniques Employed By Katherine Anne Porter In Her Stories

Katherine Anne Porter is a famous short story writer in the 20th century of America. The brilliant techniques adopted by her and the unique style make her an excellent stylist in America. Porter isn't a prolific writer and the number of her published work isn't large. Each of her stories, however, is so excellent that it attracts critics' high praise. The Collected Stories of Katherine Anne Porter, which was published in 1964, won both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award in 1966. The success of this collection lies in the stories' beautiful style, profound themes and unique characteristics. This thesis focuses on the main narrative perspectives and the characters' speech presentation used in her short stories. It's made up of four chapters: Chapter One consists of a brief introduction to Katherine Anne Porter's life and her literary achievements, the comments on The Collected Stories of Katherine Anne Porter and previous studies of Katherine Anne Porter. Chapter Two discusses the three narrative perspectives employed in Porter's stories, which are the limited omniscient perspective, the first-person perspective and the limited third-person perspective. Porter makes full use of the advantages of each kind of perspective to show the different themes of her stories with the results of enriching narrative techniques and properly heightening the themes of each story. Chapter Three mainly concentrates on the presentations of speech- free direct discourse, free indirect discourse and multiple discourses. Different forms of speech presentations constitute the unique style of the stories. Chapter Four is the conclusion. It points out the narrative perspectives and speech presentations used in Porter's stories successfully help to disclose the characters' inner worlds and promote the plot development of the stories. These two narrative techniques also help to heighten the themes of the stories.