A Study On The Narration Of Alice Munro’s Short Stories

Alice Munro is a Canadian woman writer who enjoys the reputation of "a master of short stories". She was awarded the Canada’s highest literary prize three times, Commonwealth Writers Prizes (twice), the Giller Prize (twice).In2005, Munro was listed as one of Time Magazine’s "100most influential people." She was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature2013. She has fourteen collections in total, and each of them has made great waves in the literary world. Owing to her bouncing narrative time manifested by her remarkable narrative strategy, versatile types of focalization and changing speech representations, Alice Munro has been making remarkable contributions to Canadian literature.The studies on Alice Munro and her works are flourishing at abroad; however, it is still the initial stage that the domestic study stays. At the time when the thesis is composed, there are still no academic books on Alice Munro or her works. The only resources are eight translation works of her collections, one doctoral dissertation and seven master’s theses. In China, the studies on Munro and her works relatively lag behind compared to her fame and reputation worldwide.As a literature theory developed from the latter half of the20th century, narratology has delved into the inner composing parts of the text and the relationships and links among them.In this way, the literature study has been improved into a scientific and systematic level, with Narrative Discourse by the distinguished French critic Gerard Genette as the foundation for contemporary narratology, in which narrative time, mood and voice are demonstrated. In China, the distinguished scholar Shen Dan has demonstrated point of view, narrative time and speech representation in her Narratology and the Stylistics of Fiction (1998) and Western Narratology:Classical and Postclassical (2010).Based on Gerard Genette’s and Shen Dan’s theories on narratology, and by adopting the research methods like close reading and induction, the thesis has studied some of Alice Munro’s short stories from her collections as Dance of the Happy Shades (1968), The Progress of Love (1986) and Friend of My Youth (1990) etc. from the narratological aspects like narrative time, focalization and speech representation so that her narrative strategies, narration characteristics as well as writing styles are comprehensively probed into. The thesis can be divided into five parts. Part one mainly concerns Alice Munro’s life and works, the literature review as well as the organization of the thesis. Part two has analyzed Munro’s techniques at controlling narrative time from order, duration and frequency so that the bouncing character of her narrative time is concluded. Part three starts with the focalization theory and analyzes the types of focalization as well as the shifts of focalization in her fictions. Part four has explored four types of speech representation commonly adopted in Munro’s fictions. Part five is the conclusion of the thesis, which arrives at a conclusion about Alice Munro’s narrative strategies; besides, the inadequacies of the thesis are discussed.