A Study Of Narrative Temporality In The Time Traveler’s Wife

Audrey Niffenegger wins her reputation as an internationally bestselling novelist for her debut novel The Time Traveler’s Wife. Labeled as both a science fiction and a romance, the novel narrates Henry and Clare’s love story under the scientific cloak of Henry’s time travels. Discarding the traditional interests on the science itself, the novel innovates the sci-fi literature in history with its penetrating idea of love and humanity.The Time Traveler’s Wife is the most significant novel by Niffenegger. Its application of time travel draws great attention from critics. However, most of the studies focus on the themes and plot rather than its delicate narrative strategy. Niffenegger innovatively applied nonlinear temporal order, unequal temporal duration and various temporal frequency blended with scientific elements which magnifies the discordance between the narrative temporality and story temporality in this novel. Taking Genette’s theory on narratology as the theoretical basis, this thesis focuses on the three aspects of narrative temporality of order, duration and frequency. One thing should be mentioned is that the thesis sees Henry’s time travels as literalised narrative strategy rather than a mere sci-fi element. Thus Henry’s time travels are also discussed as literalised narrative temporality in the thesis.The thesis is composed of three chapters.From the perspective of temporal order, Chapter One endeavors to probe into the analepsis and prolepsis in the novel so as to reconstruct the chronological order of the story and further explore the aesthetic and thematic meaning of the novel.Chapter Two is primarily concerned with temporal duration which is demonstrated by the length of the text and the duration of the story. Through penetrating the five types of narrative duration, their role in controlling the narrative rhythm is observed.Chapter Three investigates the temporal frequency in the novel. By exemplifying the three categories of frequency of singulative, repetitive and iterative narrative, their aesthetic effect of presenting the psychological state is revealed.The thesis aims at a comprehensive analysis from the aspect of narrative strategies. By an interpretation of the scientific cloak of The Time Traveler’s Wife, from the narratology aspect, the thesis tempts to restore the narrative temporality to lead the reader out of the temporal labyrinth.