| William Faulkner was an eminent writer and a giant of modernist fiction, well versed in modern narrative art. He broke the limitation of tradition, experimented with many writing methods and tried to find new ways and skills which could reflect new thoughts and ideas. That Evening Sun, The Bear and Dry September are his three famous short stories which deal with the ethnic relationship between the white and the black. The three short stories deeply reflect the theme of racial discrimination in the south of America with unique narrative skills. The three short stories are full of various narrative frequency, complex narrative order and intricate shift of point of view. The usage of these narrative skills help to artistically explore the themes of the short stories and make the works an organic whole both in form and in content. Critics have almost exhausted the study of his novels, and they always focus their study on his novels and relatively ignore the study of his short stories. In fact, due to the limitation of the length of short stories, writers will pay more attention to the skills of arranging plot and narrative strategies. Therefore, the narratological approach—reading aided by the insights from narratology that may prove more fruitful in explicating the narrative techniques in Faulkner's short stories—remains a field that demands further attention and studies.Drawing from theories of classical narratology, especially the insights from Narrative Discourse initiated by the famous French narratologist Gerard Genette, this dissertation focuses on the textual analysis of narrative situation, narrative voice, narrative time and narrative distance as they are presented in the three short stories That Evening Sun, The Bear and Dry September. By fusing textual analysis with theoretical explorations, the dissertation seeks, hopefully, to explicate and illustrate Faulkner's outstanding artistic narrative and the everlasting and profound effects his works produce. |
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