The Analysis Of Philip Roth’s American Trilogy From Narrative Perspective

From a narrative perspective, the paper analyzes Philip Roth’s American Trilogy American Pastoral, I Married a Communist, The Human Stain, as a whole. Specifically, via narrative point of view, narrative level, and discourse time, the paper tries to explore out the connotation and subject behind Roth’s unique narration.On American Trilogy’s narrative point of view, the paper mainly examines the external focalization, internal focalization and cross-layer narrative perspective. Roth changed various narrative points of view in these three novels. In these three novels: heavily external focalization narrates the living conditions of Jewish-American, American middle class and lower class; internal focalization classifies into two types-first-person one and third-person one. The first-person internal focalization blurs the boundary between fiction and reality, so it draws the readers close to the themes of the novels. Meanwhile, all narrations relates by the roles themselves in the third-person internal focalization, at different points of view, which let the author keep a distance from the readers, thus the readers are guided to identify the ethics and themes easily. Together, the external focalization and internal focalization confront the readers with the motifs of race, self-sense, American dream, the tragic fate of humankind, and the charm of pastoral lives.Roth set the narrative levels skillfully, due to the existing of Zuckerman in American Trilogy. The paper probes into these narrative levels in order of hyper-text level, narrative-discourse level, and action level, further reveals how Roth pays close attention to the solemn humanistic theme, which is the relationships among individual and others, individual and their family, individual and the society, individual and history.In the aspect of American Trilogy’s discourse time, the paper concludes the prolepsis and recounting from three works, stresses the analysis on the duration of summary, scene, pause and the characteristic of discourse time. The paper also discusses how the discourse time presents the themes of American Trilogy better.And in the end, the paper epitomizes the main theme of the American Trilogy American characteristics and human nature.