Narrative Strategies. "the French Lieutenant's Woman"

The French Lieutenant's Woman is a masterpiece written by John Fowles to against the theory of "The Literature of Exhaustion" in 1960s. The novel has drawn western critics'attention for its innovations and breakthroughs in narrative techniques since it was published. The study of The French Lieutenant's Woman has a significant meaning, for its special narrative techniques have pointed out a new orientation for the western literature at that time. The French Lieutenant's Woman broke the traditional writing techniques, using three narrators who have different identities and purposes to tell the story and to expose the fictional nature of the novel. The application of multiple point of view and the fluent switch of it realized the optimum combination of the point of view and narration, describing the characters from many aspects and telling stories from different point of view. The background of the novel was set in the nineteenth century, but the narrator sometimes evaluated the characters and stories at the height of twentieth century. The narrative time's flexibility and tension has been enhanced through the use of dislocation of time, the expansion and compression of the time length as well as repetition. On handling of the spatial structure, narrative collage and open-ending broke the traditional one-dimensional closed-space structure, so that the whole text showed an opening structure which made the novel a permanent art.