Multiple Texts: On Narrative Levels In A.S. Byatt's Possession

A. S. Byatt is a British writer with world-wide reputation. Possession is her most successful novel, which is a big book with in all more than 500 pages of 28 chapters and a postscript, winning the Booker Prize for Fiction in 1990. In Possession, two 20th century scholars Roland Mitchell and Maud Bailey find a series of textual fragments of Victorian period, following those fragments they reveal a secret love story between two Victorian poets, Randolph Henry Ash and LaMotte, which, meanwhile, leads to a paralleled affection between the two 20th century scholars. Ever since it was published, Possession has been labeled as postmodern for in this intelligent, literary, and ambitious masterwork, one can find almost everything such as romantic quest, scholarly treachery, epistolary styles, detective elements, myths, fairy tales, references, images and symbols and literary criticism. All these elements come together excellently in Possession. Based on the theory of narratology, this thesis explores the unique narrative strategies Byatt employs in the novel. It exams the depiction of history in Possession and interprets Byatt's relationship to postmodernism by considering her viewpoints portrayed in Possession.