Narrative Features Of The Art Of Uncontrolled Flight By Kim Ponders

This thesis reads The Art of Uncontrolled Flight from the perspective of narratology. Mainly rooted in the theory of Genette's Narrative Discourse and other related documents, the thesis attempts to explore and analyze the narrative features of this novel, in the hope of revealing Kim Ponders'unique narrative style and bold performance in narrative writing.Excluding introduction and conclusion, this thesis consists of fives chapters. Each chapter starts with its corresponding definitions, and then detailed analysis of this novel.The introduction mainly includes a brief introduction to Kim Ponders and her first novel The Art of Uncontrolled Flight, then the literature review and theoretical framework of the thesis, as well as the reasons why the present author chooses it as the research object.The first chapter starts from narrative order, with the focus on analepsis and prolepsis. It is evident that, with the help of this narrative skill, occasionally more artistic charm is added to the novel to push forward its emotional appeal.The second chapter has the most detailed discussions, dealing with narrative duration. There are four types of narrative duration: pause, scene, summary and ellipsis. With a detailed and in-depth analysis, this chapter discusses how the four types of duration are used in The Art of Uncontrolled Flight in helping express its complicated tensility of emotion.The third chapter tries to analyze narrative frequency. Combining various definitions of different types of frequencies with the text itself, this chapter points out how the three types, singulative narrative, repeating narrative and iterative narrative, respectively manifest in this novel, and what functions each kind of frequency has.The fourth chapter begins with narrative mood, focusing on distance and perspective. It discusses how the author, with the focalization shifting back and forth, adjusts narrative distances to reveal the relationship between the narrator and narrative objects.The last chapter reveals the functions narrative voice plays in this novel. The present author believes that this novel is a combination of dual-level narrative, multiple voices and three forms in its narrative voice, which gives it a multi-dimensional structure.Based upon the previous analysis, it is concluded that The Art of Uncontrolled Flight is a success. Its special narrative skills, complicated emotional appeal, profound theme as well as its delicate characterization make the novel a classic unit of external form and internal spirit. By focusing on the narrative discourse of The Art of Uncontrolled Flight, this thesis makes an attempt in its narratological analysis in its artistic effects exerted by narrative features, in the hope that it will be useful in the study and exploration of narratology.