A Study Of The Linguistic Features And Narrative Techniques In Alice Munro’s Runaway

Alice Munro(1931--) is a Canadian author writing in English. In 2013, she was awarded the Nobel Prize in literature for her work as “master of the contemporary short story”. The collection Runaway has been regarded as her representative work, which is made of eight short stories with inherent attractiveness and three of the stories are about the same character. In this collection, the heroine in each story runs away from their present life for domestic or other reasons. After experiencing runaway, they have a clearer understanding about their dilemma: wanting to runaway but choosing to return.The scholars in and aboard usually pay their attention to Munro’s early works, especially to some single one and mainly falls into feminist themes and narrative techniques. By adopting the research methods like close reading and induction, the thesis’ author takes the eight stories collection Runaway which have similar theme “escape”, as a case study with the interpretation from the perspective of narratological-stylistics to explore the narrative features and artistic effect in Alice Munro’s short stories.Firstly, the narrative discourse of different narrative forms are characterized by stylistic features and the function and characteristics of different perspectives are introduced. Compared with other modes of narration, the omniscient narration in the story “Tricks”, “Passion” and “Trespasses” provides a more flexible space. On the one side, it can give authoritative comment in a superior position, on the other side, it can communicate with readers silently in character’s position. The third person fixed internal narration in most stories attracts readers a lot and makes reader naturally touch these protagonists’ inner-world. The first reminiscent narration in “Powers” just shows Nancy’s perception so that leaves a space for the story and leads a gap between the reader’s cognition and the facts. In this way, the heroine’s lost at life, excitement at the beginning of runaway, struggling on the way of runaway and meditation after return are all presented in front of the readers and therefore pull the reader into the story experiencing everything with the heroine. Secondly, on the level of language, this thesis employs the different modes of speech presentation and rhetorical devices to develop the study. In the first place, Munro uses Direct Speech to depict the characters vividly, the intensity between Direct Speech and Indirect Speech portrays person’s personality successfully. Free Direct Speech makes readers can touch character’s very words without any preparation and makes the narration more smoothly. Taking the advantage of both Direct Speech and Indirect Speech, Free Indirect Speech can provide an opportunity of more than face to face communication with Protagonists’ consciousness so that strengthen the sympathy to them. In addition, the writer finds that Munro’s amazing stories also contributes to rhetorical devices such as symbolism, allusion, simile and personification to describe their inner contradiction and deepen the theme. Those features are more reflect people’s uncertainty and fuzziness in postmodern life pursuit from the theme “escape”.In conclusion, through applying narratological-stylistics approaches to analyze the linguistic features and narrative techniques in the collection Runaway, readers can learn the main characteristics from a new perspective. Munro’s short stories are intertwined with her language choice and in turn contributes to her success.