Analysis On The Narrative Skills In Tess Of The D'Urbervilles

Before 20th century, traditional western literary critics always concentrate themselves on the thematic contents, social functions, or moral significance in the study of narrative works, especially in the study of fiction. Meanwhile, emphasis is put on the choices of words and building of sentences used by the author in the study of narrative text. So the research on forms and skills by which the author construct his works is always ignored by the critics. Gustave Flaubert (1821-1880), the forerunner of modern fictional theory, and Henry James (1843-1916), American writer and critic, both take fiction as an individual art work. They focus their study on the forms and skills in fiction. However, the research on the structures, forms and skills of fiction does not call much attention from the researchers before 1960s in 20th century. After 1960s as narratology comes into being and develops fast, the research on common laws for fiction, research on narrative structure and skills has become more and more popular and played an important role in literary study.Narratology has an origin from French structural narratology of 1960s, which is also called"classic-narratology". New theories are developed in 1980s and 1990s, such as post-classic narratology and post-structural narratology. Narratology is a study with strong practicability. The employment of theories in narratology contributes a lot to our research on the common laws of narrative works, especially the research on the novels.As a considerably newly-developed theory, narratology has many disputable problems, such as problems on diversified use of terms to refer to the same thing, misuse or confusion of some terms, such as the ambiguousness among"story","plot"and"discourse", the confusion and misuse between"point of view"and"voice", which will be discussed in this study. Besides, this study offers a theoretical research on story, plot, focalization, narrative distance and narrator. However, theoretical study is not the ultimate goal of this thesis. The ultimate goal of this thesis is to put theory into practice. So all the theoretical study is taken in the analysis of the narrative skills in Hardy's Tess, which is one of his great master works. A great quantity of literary criticisms is contributed to Tess and most of them are taken in a traditional way. Only a few of them are concentrated on the narrative structure and skills in Tess. Apart from this, most critics take Hardy as a traditional writer and most narratologists tend to show more interest in modern new works with a conspicuous narrative feature. So they seldom give analysis on Tess from a narrative point of view. But narratology is a research on common laws of narrative works and definitely has access to every single narrative work. Since Tess is a significant narrative work, it is no exception. The study on narrative skills in Tess not only has a fundamental meaning on broadening the application of narratology to the study of novels but also offers a new perspective to understand Hardy's work and his aesthetic point of view.