Alteration And Its Modes Of Speech:a Narrative Stylistic Reading On The Great Gatsby

"Combination of stylistics and narratology has become an irresistible trend"(Shen Dan,2005). Narratological-Stylistics, as a crossed approach of narratology and stylistics, brings a broader vision into theoretical and practical levels and provides a comprehensive room for literary studies. The focalization is one important element both in narratology and stylistics. It is not only an effective way to express the narrative content, a key factor to novel’s artistic effects, but also a specific approach to create the writer’s aesthetic ideal. Alteration as a subordinate of focalization is a most powerful tool to form the writer’s unique narrative style and it can be strongly expressed by modes of speech. According to Leech and Short’s theory, the modes of speech include direct speech, indirect speech, free direct speech, etc. Different modes of speech can adjust the narrative distance between narrator, readers, and characters to get a certain stylistic effects. The Great Gatsby by Scott Fitzgerald has always been considered as a masterpiece of narrative. Fitzgerald combines advantages of different focalization in order to overcome the deficiency of one definite type with the techniques of alteration. The alteration takes the advantage of the integrated focalizations and helps to develop the whole story. What’s more, different mode of speech in alteration enriches the narrative techniques and shows its specific artistic charm.This thesis aims at combing the advantages of stylistics and narratology, and displaying the functions of the alteration and its modes of speech. The certain stylistic effects can be gained by the analysis of alteration and its modes of speech. The present study takes Professor Shen Dan’s theory of focalization as the theoretical framework, analyzes the alteration and its modes of speech in The Great Gatsby in detail.This study mainly adopts qualitative analysis. Based on the detailed reading of the original text, the author identifies and classifies the relevant plots. Through data analysis and graphing, the study selects the representative paragraphs and explains their stylistic effects. The major findings of this thesis are:1) in The Great Gatsby, there are two kinds of alterations-the first-person focalization invaded by free focalization and the third-person external focalization invaded by free focalization in this story.2) By direct speech, indirect speech and narrative report of speech acts in the first kind of alteration, horizons become unlimitedly open, which result in a polyphonic effect. By free indirect speech in the second kind of alteration, there is a dramatic sense that suspense is solved.The thesis includes five chapters. Chapter one mainly introduces the research background, which includes the research purpose, the research questions, the research rationales, and the research methodology of the present study. Chapter two talks about the literature review of the previous studies both at home and abroad, which includes the literature review of The Great Gatsby, the literature review of narrative focalization, the literature review of the development of alterations. Chapter three presents the theoretical foundation-Professor Shen Dan’s theory of narrative focalization. Chapter four is central to this study. This chapter solves the two research questions:1) how does Fitzgerald arrange the alteration in The Great Gatsby?2) what functions do the different modes of speech presentation have in alteration? Chapter five offers the conclusion of this study, and points out the contributions, and limitations of this study, which gives a further suggestion for the other studies. The thesis combines the method of Narratology and Stylistics and focuses on the alteration and modes of speech in order to explore the presentation of theme, characters, and discourse.