The Functions Of The Narrator In Barchester Towers

Barchester Towers is the second in the series of novels known as Chronicles of Barsetshire, written by the Victorian novelist Anthony Trollope. The great narrative skills is the distinct characteristic of Barchester Towers, in which Trollop frequently states that the novel is fictitious by the comments of the intrusive narrator. The present thesis mainly adopts as the conceptual framework the narratological theory of Seymour Chatman with the purpose of exploring the functions of the omnipresent narrator and the effects of this narrative mode yields on the style of the novel and on the reader.In my thesis, I first introduce Trollope and the comment upon Barchester Towers, pointing out the purpose and significance of choosing the topic.Then Chatmen's theory is applied to analyze the narrative functions of the omnipresent narrator in the novel. In this paper, the emphasis is put on the analysis of the communicative function and commentary function. As the core of communication in the text, the narrator faces the implied reader as well as the narratee. In Barchester Towers, the narrator works from the beginning to establish a surface rhetoric of intimacy and relaxation with the narratee through confiding the end of the characters. The narrative person is also shifted from the singular to plural. According to Chatman' theory, the commentary function embodied in the commentary on the story and discourse. The commentary on the story includes interpretation, judgment and generalization, which is associated with narrator's ideology, playing an importance role on the significance of the novel.Also discussed in the thesis are the effects of the narrator's narration. The effects mainly include the following two aspects. The first is the effect upon the textual structure. The narrator adopts multiple perspectives to analyze the characters and events. The second is the effects upon the reader's aesthetic experience. It is divided into two parts. In the first part, I tend to point out the aesthetic distance by analyzing the moral difference between character and implied reader. In the second part, I prove the narrative unreliability of the omnipresent narrator on the base of the narratological theory and Booth's the rhetoric of fiction.In the end of the thesis, the conclusion is drawn that the reader should reconstruct the text value because of the narrative unreliability in Barchester Towers,...