An Analysis Of Narrative Strategy In Gravity’s Rainbow

Thomas Pynchon is a hermit, but his works are known to all. His most outstanding contribution to literature is his innovation in narrative techniques. Gravity’s Rainbow, considered as Pynchon’s masterpiece, has been a focus in literature world since its publication in 1973. The following year, 1974, the book was awarded National Book Awards. In the book, Pynchon shows his exuberant erudition, and adopts many creative skills that greatly deviated from traditional rules of novel writing, to bring the readers an entirely new reading experience: the content is massy and complex, but profound; the writing style is weird but creative; the design of the work is puzzled but delicate. In the light of Gerard Genette’s narratology, this thesis discusses Pynchon’s narrative strategies from two aspects: narrative time and narrative subject. On one hand, it mainly makes a deep exploration to the narrative structure, explores Pynchon’s outstanding achievements in writing and provides a new angle to evaluate the novel; On the other hand, it offers a little help for the readers to understand other such works.Traditional novels often tell stories orderly according to the linear time. Different from traditional narrative rules, this novel arranges the events without considering the linear time development. The pseudo time which presented by the narrated events is quite different from their actual-happening-time. And in the narration, Pynchon uses flashback and flash-forward frequently, with little transition. The time duration in Gravity’s Rainbow presents its uniqueness as well. The narrative speed of the novel changes fast and frequently. Through the devices of summary, pause, ellipsis and scene, the author arranges the development of story willfully. He uses several words or sentences to summarize decades, or stops the narration suddenly to describe another thing, or omits some incidents imperceptibly. All of these devices break traditional narration rules, which correspond to the disordered time. As a result, the novel is led to achrony.All narratives are uttered by the voice of a narrator or several narrators. And the stories are always presented from certain “visions”. Gravity’s Rainbow uses three kinds of narrators who have different identities. These narrators tell the stories in different ways, bring a deeper connotation to the work. Focalization refers to the relations between the story presented and vision through which it is presented. In Gravity’s Rainbow, three types of focalizations are employed in narrating different stories: zero focalization, internal focalization and external focalization. The shifting focalizations express a dynamic rhyme of the work.In the light of narratology, this thesis will intensify and broaden the research on narrative strategies of Gravity’s Rainbow. And through analysis, the paper draws a conclusion that Gravity’s Rainbow is an encyclopedic novel with distinctive features.