Reading The French Lieutenant's Woman In The Light Of The Concept Of Virtuality

John Fowles(1926-2005) was regarded as one of the most talented novelists after the Second World War.His representative novel The French Lieutenant's Woman was classified as the canon of the post-modern novels,and won a good fame since its publication.It became the teaching material for the course of the contemporary novel in the English department of some universities in western countries.The concept of virtuality comes from Narratologies:New Perspectives on Narrative Analysis,with two basic meanings,one is an opposition to the real thing,the other is the potential."The virtual is not that which is deprived of reality,but that which possesses the potential,or force of developing into actual existence." The thesis is an analysis of The French Lieutenant's Woman in the light of the concept of virtuality.Chapter One is the study of the parody of the novels in the nineteenth century,such as the content,the style,the characters and so on.The novel tells a story which happened one hundred years ago and creates a possible,virtual and imaginary world.However,the narrator who lived in the 1960s depicted the story which had happened in the 1860s.The narration itself is the reflection of the history and is the counterfactual as well.The counterfactual can happen no more than in the text of the narrator and embodies the function of the concept of virtuality.The second part focuses on the author's employment of anachronism which renders the imagined past transform into the real present naturally.The imagined story that happened in the past still could happen at present.The potential of the virtual flowers and has seeds in the reality.The author employs the concept of morphing as well.The morphing in the narrative affects the narrator's narrating mode and his position in the novel,"Morphing does not affect a character or an object within the world of the narrated,but the virtual individual presupposed by the act of narration." The morphing in the novel belongs to the morphing from the narrator into the author.He appears in the novel in the form of "â… ",and is an observer to the narrated,at the same time,he is a modern novelist who admits that the narrated is totally imagined by himself."The concept of morphing not only frees the text from the 'mystifying singleness' of the narrator,it also gives dynamism to form,"and visibility to the concept of virtuality.At the same time,the concept of the morphing transforms the past into the present naturally and forms a sense of continuity in time and space.The virtual that happened in the past could still occur today and even in the future.The third part analyzes the potential which could be actualized in the same world.Charles's dilemma transforms into the people's puzzlement in the 1960s.The case of Charles is helpful for the readers to solve the modern people's puzzlement."Events that do not happen are as important to the understanding of narrative as events reported in the factual mode."In The French Lieutenant's Woman,the narrator's imagination conjures a world of Charles-Ernestina-Sarah,and creates an emotional involvement in the fate of nonexisting characters.People should narrate not the things what happened but what would happen,even more than one hundred years later.