On Chronotopes In Bellefleur From The Perspective Of Narrative Strategies

Joyce Carol Oates is a remarkably prolific woman writer in contemporary America. She is versatile with her works covering novels, short stories, poems, plays and essays. Compared with her other literary genres, Oates' novel is supposed to be the best, which secures her reputation as one of the most talented writers in America. Undoubtedly, Bellefleur is so far one of the most brilliant works in Oates' writing career, for it confirms a transition from her early claustrophobic tendencies towards the assured originality of her later works.Bellefleur represents Oates' extremely complex sense of time and space, which matches well with Mikhail Bakhtin's chronotopes theory, perfectly demonstrated by its delicate narrative strategies, such as anachrony, reversed structure as well as collage and other forms.With the development of modernism, especially postmodernism in literature, chronotopes (time-spaces) achieved by writers' employment of a variety of narrative strategies have become more and more alienated as well as complicated. Fortunately, the method provided by narratology has increasingly offered their special advantages in literary analyses including chronotopic investigation. Therefore, an analysis of chronotopes in literary works from the perspective of narrative strategies is possible as well as significant.The author of this thesis attempts to study chronotopes in Bellefleur from the perspective of narrative strategies, especially drawing on Gerard Genette's narrative theories in four chapters. Chapter 1 is a brief introduction to Bakhtin's chronotopes theory as well as narrative theory and narrative strategies, focusing on feasibility and significance of a research on chronotopes in terms of narrative strategies. Chapter 2, based on a specific text-analysis, examines how anachronies help to present irreversible time, core of Bakhtin's sense of time, in Bellefleur. Chapter 3 is mainly concerned with how Bellefleur Manor - concrete embodiment of Bakhtin's topes, especially "castle theory" - is depicted with a reversed structure. Chapter 4, the kernel of the thesis, centers on how genre variation and juxtaposition are realized by the employment of collage. Oates' delicate and successful genre shifts by way of collage highlights the writing techniques used in the whole novel.Hopefully, the thesis proper, aiming at a careful analysis of the chronotopes in Bellefleur from the perspective of narrative strategies may enhance our understanding of Oates' complicated sense of time and space as well as draw more attention of readers and critics to this most ambitious novel, for Bellefleur is a genuinely imaginative and intelligent work.