Narrative Strategies Analysis Of The Chronicles Of Narnia

As one of the intellectual giants of the twentieth century, C. S. Lewis is not only a distinguished literature historian and critic in Oxford and Cambridge University, a most influential Christian theologian and a big speaker, but also a most popular writer in science fiction and children’s literature. The seven-volume The Chronicles of Narnia is his most famous work. The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe aroused strong repercussions when it was published in1950, and The Last Battle earned Lewis the highest prize of children’s literature in Britain——Carnegie Prize for Literature. Until now, The Chronicles of Narnia has been translated into more than thirty languages, and has sold about one hundred million copies. The domestic research articles of The Chronicles of Narnia more analyzed its Christian metaphors and symbols. By using the theory of narration, this article analyzes the narrative strategies of The Chronicles of Narnia."Narrative strategies" refers to the narrative method or art the author applied to achieve a certain pre-set text effect. This article analyzes the narrative strategies of The Chronicles of Narnia from three aspects——narrative time and space, narrative structure, narrative voice. First of all, the work used the narrative strategy of multiple time and space. There were two different time and space (the everyday world and Narnia) in The Chronicles ofNarnia. However Aslan was the eternal beyond the time, and the only way to go to Aslan’s land was death. Second, in the narrative structure, Lewis adopted folk tales structure, which was widely used in the children’s literature. The stories become familiar and fresh because of this narrative structure, and they are coincident with the readers’ psychological needs, so that the reading process is safe and full of expectation. Finally, the third part of this article analyzes the narrative strategy of authoritative voice. The narrator "I" left many traces in the text, he not only talked to readers, but also commented on the characters and events in the stories. The narrator hoped to establish his own authority in the text, and guided the readers to agree with his ethics and values. The narrative voice in The Chronicles of Narnia belonged to the type of authorial voice, the reliable narrator and the implied author had a strong consistency, and the narrator’s voice was close to the author’s voice. The use of these narrative strategies achieved the desired effect. Lewis grabbed the children’s curiosity and made them accept his Christian ethics and values invisibly.