A Study On Narrative Discourse Of Conrad’s Fictions

Joseph Conrad, one of the important writers in the literary world, wrote manyinfluential novels during his writing career. These works mainly fall into threecategories: sea fictions, jungle fictions and social political novels. And “The Niggar ofthe ‘Narcissus’”、“Lord Jim”、“Nostromo” are the most representative novels of eachcategory in his whole works.Conrad’s fictions were introduced to China in the1930s. Since then, many ofChinese scholars had researched Conrad’s works from multiple angles such asarchetypal criticism, existentialism, postcolonialism, feminism, symbolism, racism etc.But Chinese scholars didn’t concern Conrad’s unique narrative art until the end of20century, and most of studies focus on his single works, especially on the fiction“Heart of Darkness”. The breadth and systemic of research achievements are verydeficient. Therefore, researching Conrad’s novels deeply and comprehensively from anarrative point of view is very necessary.In the light of the narrative discourse theory of Gérard Genette, this thesis tries toanalyze Conrad’s fictions, especially “The Niggar of the ‘Narcissus’”、“Lord Jim”、“Nostromo”, and investigate Conrad’s unique narrative art.The thesis includes three parts: the introduction, main body and conclusion. TheIntroduction presents briefly about Conrad’s life experience, the current Conradresearches, and Conrad’s fictions’ narrative meaning. The main body is composed ofthree chapters. Chapter one analyzes the order of narrative time、the narrative durationand the narrative frequency in Conrad’s novels, and sums up these three parts to makea more clear understanding of Conrad’s narrative time art. Chapter two introduces themood of Conrad’s fictions, including narrative distance and narrative focalizations.Chapter three, the Voice, attempts to show the special narrative levels and narrator inConrad’s works. Finally, we come to the conclusion, also the last part of the thesis,that the art of narratology in Conrad’s novels is superb and worth of research furthermore.