Love And Loss In Disparate Times

Lighthousekeeping is the eighth novel of Jeanette Winterson, one of the most skillful contemporary British novelists. It was listed in 2004 Best Foreign Novels in China and gained the nomination for 2005 Commonwealth Writers'Prize. Her poetic and precise language, non-linear narrative and power of storytelling leave a deep impression on readers. The narrative strategies are typical and play a great role in the representation of the themes. However, few researches give a systematic analysis on them. Therefore, the thesis analyzes the narrative strategies of Lighthousekeeping mainly in the light of Gerard Genette's narratological theories.The thesis consists of five chapters.Chapter One makes a brief introduction to Jeanette Winterson and critical reception of Lighthousekeeping and states the theoretical basis and structure of the thesis.Chapter Two focuses on the two-level narrative structure from the aspects of their contents, relationship and effects. In such a structure, ten dialogues separate the story of Silver at the first level and other stories at the second level and make the present story of Silver interweave with the past story of Babel Dark and the fictional love story of Tristan and Isolde like a labyrinth. The relationship of contrast between the two levels highlights the growth of Silver under the influence of her feminist self-consciousness, and the death of Babel Dark caused by his loss and unbalance.Chapter Three discusses the double narrators:Silver and Mr. Pew. At the first level, Silver, as a first-person narrator, narrates her own life story, in which readers can sense her psychological changes in different phases. At the second level, Silver and Pew are both omniscient third-person narrators, though the first-person pronouns appear in Silver's narration. However, Pew, as a heterodiegetic narrator, narrates the story of Babel Dark from his zero focalization while Silver, as a heterodiegetic narrator, retells the story of Babel Dark from the internal focalizations of Babel Dark and Molly. Silver's narration follows Pew's. Thus, the focalizations of Babel Dark's story shift from the outside to the inside, which makes Silver more reliable than Pew. Especially when Silver realizes that Babel Dark was not ruined by Molly but himself through her feminist self-examination, Pew's comment on the story of Babel Dark at the beginning becomes an irony which emphasizes the importance of feminist self-examination and reveals that Pew is an unreliable narrator while Silver a reliable one.Chapter Four explores the narrative time from three aspects:order, duration and frequency. In the story of Babel Dark, the combination of analepsis and ellipsis brings a series of cliffhangers for readers, and the application of summary and scene successfully strengthens the rhythm of the story and makes the story more readable. Singualtive narratives, repeating narrative and iterative narrative emphasize certain events, which give clues to the themes.Chapter Five reviews the whole thesis and draws a conclusion. Winterson's proposal about the non-existence of continuous narrative and the labyrinth-like narrative structure strengthen the rhythm of Lighthousekeeping, make the novel more readable and successfully represent her recurrent themes:love and feminist self-consciousness. The alternation of Babel Dark's past story and Silver's present story represents the same love and loss as all her previous novels did. The relationship of contrast between the stories of disparate times suggests that the present has a close relation with the past, which is Winterson's apperception after she experienced a "mental collapse" in her "dark decade". Thus, it is a fact that Silver's psychological journey from unbalance to balance is what happened to Winterson in 1990s. Storytelling is metaphorized by Winterson into everything including love and life. Besides, the power of the feminist self-consciousness stimulates readers'enthusiasm in exploring life and pursuing love, which is just the purpose of Winterson.