Margaret Atwood Novel's Narrative Art

Margaret Atwood is a contemporary famous poet, novelist and literary critic of Canada, known as the "Queen of Canadian literature." Her novels have high reputations and won worldwide readers'attention. These works are not only concerned about the survival status of women, the Canadian national identity, ecological aspects of Marxism, etc, but also concerned about the narrative forms, which establish a monument for the contemporary narrative literature. Based on narrative theory, combining Atwood's six novels, this article will explore Atwood's novels'narrative art mainly from three angles. Introduction, body and conclusion are included in this article.The "introduction" briefly introduces Atwood and her literary achievements. Through a general review of Atwood's novel criticism in recent years in China, this part proposes some questions about Atwood's novels'narrative art and research methods to solve.The body is totally of three chapters. Chapter one analyzes the narrative perspective, narrative voice and unreliable narrator of narrative subject in Atwood's novels. When choosing the narrative points of view, Atwood often uses the first person—female characters'view to form a fixed, single point, or combines it with author omniscient perspective, the third character's perspective and original document to present the works a mobility, multiple modus. And by choosing narrative perspective, Atwood expresses her feminism. At the same time, she strongly gives women voice, looks for women's audients, and actively creates female's narrative authority. Unreliable narrator strategy is also widely used to express multiple text contents and create a "sound resonance" situation.Chapter two focuses on the time art by analyzing Atwood's novels'narrative time. Atwood has a very deep understanding of time. When setting narrative time, She boldly uses Syria, Flashback, pre-classification methods. All of these make her works present colorful time forms:The linearity of time, personal time, psychological time, disorder time and space time, etc.Chapter three expounds the narrative structures of Atwood's novels. This part discusses chain structure, Reticular structure, collage and patching structure, China packing carton structure and double clues echo structure in Atwood's novels. These both follow and depart from the tradition novels."Conclusion" is centered on the summary of Atwood's novels'narrative art. That Atwood is able to become a best-selling novelist and a classic writer of literary theory is absolutely due to her inheriting the tradition novel theories and combining with the modernism and postmodernism theories. Atwood does not entirely depart from the traditional novel, and meanwhile she has the courage to create new narrative techniques to enrich the narrative theory. After all, we can say that Atwood has contributed to the development of narrative literature.