On The Relationship Of Person Narratives And Readers’Judgment

Person is an important term in narrative theory, but its significance in narrative has not been fully developed. The traditional narrative theory mainly involves person as the classification criteria and only makes a simple and brief discussion about the narrative effects of different persons. The classical narratology distinguishes a series of narrative elements and conducts an in-depth and detailed study on them; however, it touches little on person as a narrative term and even to some extent negates the value of the existence of person. Things remain unchanged until the development of narratology steps into the post-classical period when research on narratology flourishes and the significance of person generally attracts the attention of researchers. Narrative theorists of different schools such as Rhetorical Narratology, Cognitive Narratology, Natural Narratology and Feminist Narratology explore the meaning of person in narrative in their own theoretical systems. Despite the differences in starting points and methods, reader has become the common topic in all research schools, which provides an important reference for the following systematic study of person.This thesis intends to give a systematic analysis to the relationship of person and readers’judgment in different narratives. Since Rhetorical Narratology is a relatively open and inclusive school in Post-classical Narratologies and James Phelan, as the representative theorist of this school, devotes a whole article to the relationship of person and its rhetoric effects, this thesis discusses the relationship of person narrative(first-person narrative, second-person narrative, third-person narrative and relatively experimental multi-person narrative) and readers’judgment on the basis of Rhetorical Narratology by Phelan while using some research methods of other post-classical schools for reference. The discussion focuses on the position relationship of the reader and the narrator and that of the characters and the author as well as the resulting readers’interpretation and judgment by using text phenomenon as the basis, readers’reading as the guidance, analysis of authors’intention as the complement, Chinese and Western narrative works as examples. To be specific, the study on first-person narrative and second-person narrative is carried out within the following two layers:the interaction between the reader and the text and that between the reader and the author. Besides, the effect of the transition of focalization on the relationship of person and readers’judgment is also discussed. In view of the huge capacity of third-person narrative, the relationship of its objective mode, review mode and subjective mode and readers’judgment is respectively explored. Due to the wide variety of the multi-person narrative, this thesis puts it in categories and generally expounds the relationship of person and readers’judgment from the angles of narrators’identity judgment, narrative perspective and reading distance.