The Enchantment Of Multiple Narrative

The Never-ending Story (Die Unendliche Geschichte) was written by German fantasy literature master Michael Ende (Micaed Ende). Thanks to its meta-fictive structure, two narrative layers are created in the text, the diegetic and hypodiegetic levels, and a complicated double world is held in different narrative layers in the work, in which both realistic and fictional characters exist and interact.The meta-fictive device employed in this novel aimes at erasing boundaries between reality and fiction and interrogating our perception of reality as "real". Using two shades of colored ink, the novel shifts back and forth between the two levels of reality, Ende depictes the act of reading itself and the reader’s imaginative role in the creation of the story, thus encouraging the identification of the novel’s actual reader with Bastian and forcing the reader to indulge the imagination in aesthetic play, where reality exists only in the interaction of text and mind.This thesis starts with the narrative features of the work, which combines the fantasy and the real world smoothly and then analyzes different themes conceived in different narrative layers. Strongly influenced by the German romantics, the novel conceives a visionary realm in the diegetic layer to represent the spiritual world of human being contrast with the real world, thus calling for a meaningful and creative interrelation between reality and the realm of the imagination, and urging people to treasure the magic of imagination and not lose a poetical habitat in face of the materialism; Then in the hypodiegetic layer, the myth of the loss and regaining of identity is described, which is not merely a "Subject-Mythos" but a myth of the redemption not only of the individual but also of the society which the individual calls home and shares with others. Then, the thesis tries to analyze how the two heroes’ inter-subjectivity is created in this novel. The heroes who exist in different narrative layers have influence with each other. The relationship between the two heroes is governed in a significant way by the relation of reality to fiction, which is a central theme dominating The Never-ending Story in its entirety.