On Narrative Strategies In O. Henry's Short Stories

O. Henry (1862—1910), whose original name is William Sydney Porter, is one of the three greatest short story masters in the world and the founders of American modern short story. As a master of short stories, O. Henry aroused great interest from critics ten years after his death. Both at home and abroad, critics comment on O. Henry and his works mainly with respect to the themes of humanity, vivid plots, frequent coincidences, surprising ending, and humorous language and so on.Yet, O. Henry's distinctive narrative strategies have not drawn so much attention from critics as they are deserved up to the date. In view of these conditions, the present thesis is an attempt to analyze O. Henry's classical short stories by using relevant modern narrative theories so as to find out its skillful narrative techniques and reveal its distinctive narrative strategies. In a word, it aims at presenting a new perspective for research on O. Henry's works.This thesis begins with a general review of O. Henry's life, literature achievements and previous studies of his works. Then by applying relevant theories on modern narratology, it focuses on analyzing the narrative strategies in O. Henry's short stories from mainly three aspects: various narrative points of view (modes of focalization) and relevant narrative discourses; moving narrative spaces; coordinate narrative time.Taking O. Henry's three short stories as examples, the author finds that by employing different focalizations and relevant narrative discourses to different stories, O. Henry provides the readers with a whole picture of the life of his time. Furthermore, each mode of focalization has its significance in achieving the thematic importance for the story.Deriving from his living experience, O. Henry mainly has New York, Texas in the West and Honduras in Latin America as the three narrative spaces of his works. The narrative space in his works refers not only to a geographical space, but also a cultural space of politics, economy, and traditional customs. He devotes different emotions to people in different spaces, he shows sympathy to New York; appreciation to the West; and forgiveness to Latin America.As for narrative time, this thesis investigates O. Henry's three typical short stories—The Furnished Room(1906),The Gift of the Magi (1906)and A Service of Love(1906). Through making physical time serve psychological time and selecting episodes of life, O. Henry organically unites physical time with psychological time and reveals the true meaning of life; through acceleration and deceleration, he adjusts the narrative speed properly; and by employing different frequencies and suspense, he achieves tense narrative impetus.The part of conclusion makes an objective assessment on the significance of O. Henry and the narrative strategies in his works on the basis of the analysis in this thesis. The unique narrative strategies in O. Henry's short stories provides another important angle for reading and researching into his works, which has been proved to be worthwhile and rewarding in this thesis.