The Dramatization In John Barth’s Chimera

John Barth is an eminent practitioner and theoretician of postmodernistfiction in the Twentieth Century of America. As one of the most outstandingrepresentatives of the postmodernism, Barth has created numerous splendid worksand has an important position in American literature history or even in worldwideliterature. Of all his works, Chimera, which has achieved the National Book Awardfor Fiction, is one of his typical ones representing his unique creation concepts.While, although Barth’s Chimera is a novel, it has prominent dramaticcharacteristics. In this novel, it contains typical dramatic elements, which, are thedramatic speech, dramatic conflict and dramatic situation. And, all these threefactors work together to build the effect of the dramatization that Chimera haspresented. Therefore, This thesis will use the dramatic elements which are impliedin Chimera to analyze the dramatization in it.This thesis consists of five parts, which are the introduction, the first chapter,the second chapter, the third chapter and the conclusion. In the introduction part, itwill explain why the paper has chosen the dramatization angle to study the novelChimera as well as what is the significance of this paper. Besides, it will make anintroduction of the domestic and foreign research situations of this novel. What’smore, this paper will also make an introduction of the related dramatic theories andthe main chapters contained in this paper. In the first chapter, it will discuss thedramatic speech which including the analysis of the dialogues’ function as well asthe dramatic speech actions’ function. In the second chapter, it is about the dramaticconflicts, which consists of the the distinct conflicts between characters, the innerconflicts of the characters and the conflicts between the characters with their ownfates. The third part is about the dramatic situation. It will focus on analyzing thedramatic situation which is made up of the event and the characters’ relationshipswith each other. The last part is the conclusion part, which will give a summary ofthe main arguments of this thesis. Through the analysis of the dramatization in Barth’s novel Chimera, thispaper is making efforts to reveal the writer Barth, besides his creative use of the oldmaterials to create his literary work Chimera he has also tried to use the old andout-fashioned writing techniques, the drama techniques as well, to overcome thewriter’s block and get out of the literary exhaustion. Furthermore, focusing on thedramatic perspective, the interpretation of this paper could also provide a new anglefor the readers to comprehend Barth’s fantastic creating thoughts and unique writingtechniques.