A Study Of Narrative Time And Narrative Space In Jazz

Toni Morrison is a famous black woman writer in nowadays, and she won the Nobel Prize for Literature in1993. Her works root in the history of black people and she pays close attention to the living conditions and mental states of blacks, and Jazz is one of them Because of her magnificent works and her insightful opinions, Morrison has been studied by scholars both from home and abroad. The study has changed from single-perspective-orientation to multi-perspective-orientation. With few decades’ development of study, scholars have applied Feminist criticism, Reader-Response criticism, Narrative approach and Eco criticism to analyze and explore the themes and narrative styles of her works. Due to the spatial turn in recent years, the issue of narrative space has attracted great attention gradually. However, few articles have approached Morrison’s Jazz from the perspective of spatial and temporal narrative.Therefore, this paper regards Toni Morrison’s novel Jazz as the object of study and explores the narrative time, narrative space and narrative strategies in it by applying the methods of close reading and quantitative analysis of data.The paper mainly includes: first, narrative time in novels may include the time of story and the time of narrative, and the author will use strategies of narrative time, such as analepses and prolepses, to achieve certain effect. Second, the author of this paper analyzes the narrative space of the text, and divides it into four types: existential spaces, psychological spaces, social spaces and cultural spaces. The author also explores the relations between spaces, the musicality of space, and spatial images in Jazz, which could help the reader to understand the text deeply. Third, this paper studies the interrelationship between narrative time and narrative space, and discusses the relationships between narrative space-time and other narrative strategies.