A Narrative Study Of J. M. Coetzee's Elizabeth Costello

John Maxwell Coetzee, as one of the greatest contemporary fiction writers in English, was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 2003. His work Elizabeth Costello published in 2003 differs dramatically from his previous works in the aspect of narrative form. This book is an experimental fiction which is the combination of philosophical speeches and art of fiction. Thus the present thesis attempts to study its original and experimental form by recourse to the theories of Genette's narrative discourse, further to unravel the correlation between the theme and the narrative form of Elizabeth Costello.In a postmodern society, the protagonist Elizabeth Costello realizes that she is powerless to influence the surrounding world with the weapon of literature which has guided her to care about human beings and their world. She is thus in a state of confusion and doubt, and subsequently her belief in literature collapses with her life spiralling down. The theme of the novel is not only manifested through its filtration into every lecture that the protagonist Elizabeth Costello has delivered, but also is embodied in the narrative form of the novel. In the process of analysis, tense, mood and voice-three aspects of narrative discourse-are examined in detail so as to achieve the goal of the thesis. By the study of its tense, more emphasis will be put on the feature of fragmentation in order to show its correspondence to the protagonist Elizabeth Costello's chaotic inner world when it comes to belief. The subsequent part is the study of mood which is the technique employed to regulate information. Focalization as one of the two modalities of mood is to be studied in detail because it greatly contributes to representing the theme of the text. In Elizabeth Costello, different focalization causes different effects. The shift of zero focalization, internal focalization and external focalization exposes Elizabeth Costello's gradual loss of her belief as she is aging. The third aspect of narrative, namely, voice is to be analyzed from three aspects: the narrator and the narrative levels, the narratee at the narrative levels and time of narrating. The analysis of voice on the one hand can illustrate how the narrators and the narratees respectively participate in representing and creating meanings, and on the other can highlight the art of fiction by using "simultaneous narrating." In conclusion, Coetzee's employment of original narrative strategies in Elizabeth Costello succeeds in suggesting that the protagonist of the novel, in general, the writers living in the postmodern society gradually lose their belief in literature because they are doubtful, confused and powerless when they intend to employ literature to influence the reality. More significantly, Coetzee has explored a fresh way for the writers living in postmodern society to express confusion, doubt as well as belief crisis.