On The Growth Of Fiction First - Person Narrative

The initiation story is a genre of novel which focuses on describing the growing-up experiences of a young man. It originates from Bildungsroman in German literature, which we called educational novel.During the 18^th and 19^th centuries, in English and American literature, boundless of such novels appeared one after another, taking an attractive look. The theme of the initiation story is very distinctive and its narrative mode is comparatively simple with some regular patterns.In china, according to my knowledge, the researches about such kind of novels are very scarce—only one monograph and scores of articles, and those studies about its narrative modes are even few. Out of China, the studies about such kind of novels are really countless, but their focuses are always on its theme and social meaning without more attention to its way of narrative.However, with a comparatively thorough probe, I find out the narrative mode of initiation stories has a unique characteristic and most initiation stories tend to use the first-person narrative. A curiosity about whether it is a coincidence or a certainty then hovers in my mind, urging me to find the answer about whether the first-person narrative chooses the initiation stories or initiation stories choose the first-person narrative or indeed they choose each other at the same time.With the analysis of the characteristics of the first-person narrative and initiation stories as well as four great works of initiation stories, the paper is aimed to investigate and illustrate the advantages of first-person narrative when being used in initiation stories. The theories about linguistics, psychology and aesthetics contribute a lot to the following study in strengthening the reliability of the conclusion.