On Katherine Anne Porter's Narrative Techniques

Katherine Anne Porter (1890-1980) ranks among the most celebrated southern writers of the 20^th century American literature. 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 receives 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 inl966.The success of this collection lies in the stories' beautiful style, profound themes and unique characteristics.Critics in early times paid their attention on the study of the forms and techniques of symbolism and imagery in Porter's works. Later the critics began to focus on the research of themes in the works. And in recent years, more and more interpretations about her works are from the angle of feminism. This thesis tries to make a discussion about the feminist narrative strategies and characters' speech presentation that used in The Collected Stories of Katherine Anne Porter and to show how these narrative techniques help to heighten the theme of the novels.The first chapter 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.The second and third chapters are to explore the narrative techniques in the Miranda stories with the theoretical support of Susan Lanser's feminist narratological studies. In Katherine Anne Porter's short stories, it is not difficult for the reader to find her criticism of the patriarchal society, though put in a reticent way. According to Janis P. Stout, feminist themes are presented in an elusive manner, that is, they are embedded in a domestic world that overtly, at least, celebrates the traditional roles of women as centers of family life (Stout, 1995: 191). In the Miranda stories, behind Miranda's refusal and reticence of speech, a female voice is uttered to resist the patriarchal culture surrounding her. Janis P. Stout argues, "she resorts to passive-aggression—a typical behavior adjustment of women in a patriarchal society—through withdrawal and verbal suppression" (Stout, 1990: 145). Such strategy of reticence of narration is achieved by "a relationship between the'method of narration' and the 'basic attitude of the author'" (Lanser, 1981:18).The narrative strategy in the Miranda stories can be approached by Lanser's poetics of point of view in two aspects, namely status of the narrative voice, and narrative contact. Concerning the first aspect, most of the narrators in her fiction are the authorial narrators, which have more power in the presentation of feminist ideology. With regard to the contact between the narrator and the narratee in the Miranda stories, it is indirect and covert because "I" narrators cannot be found. According to Lanser, "the practices at the 'indirect' pole are not commonly found in homodiegetic (first-person) narrative" (Lanser, 1981:176). However, Lanser fails to provide an effective method to identify the covert contact between the narrator and the narratee for she tries to solve the problem by "narrative self-consciousness". Now that both of the narrator and the narratee are difficult to be recognized in third-person texts, how can "narrative self-consciousness" be identified? Lanser also admits that the narratee's identity is likely conveyed "through deep structural levels of the text" (Ibid., 180). However, Gerald Prince in his article Introduction to the Study of the Naratee included in Essentials of the Theory of Fiction (1988) employs sentence structures to signify the narratee's identity so as to locate the contact between the narrator and the narratee. In this light, the thesis explores a covert affinity between the narrator and the narratee, which is proved by signals provided by Prince to identify the narratee.Chapter Four mainly concentrates on the presentation of speech—free direct discourse, free indirect discourse and multiple discourses. Different forms of speech presentations constitute the unique style of the stories.Chapter Five is the conclusion .It points out that the female narrative strategies and speech presentation 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.