On The Techniques Employed In The Narration Of Postcards From No Man’s Land

Aidan Chambers has devoted himself to writing children’s literature since 1968 and been regarded as one of the most popular children’s literature novelists around the world. In 1999, he was awarded the Carnegie Medal for the superbly crafted and thought-provoking novel Postcards from No Man’s Land, the fifth one of his six-volume Dance Sequence. Postcards from No Man’s Land weaves two seemingly separated stories in different times into an integral part. The 17-year-old Jacob set foot on Amsterdam the first time for the commemoration of the Battle of Arnhem where his grandfather fought fifty years ago and died. He visited an old lady Geertrui who told him an extraordinary story about love and growth in the war, linking Jacob with her Dutch family in a way he never expected and forcing him to question his place in the world.Recently, the research on Chambers’ novel has become heated, most of which focus on the themes, such as the initiation of the protagonists, while ignore the extraordinary narrative techniques. Therefore, the purpose of this thesis is to explore the relationship between narrative techniques and themes in Postcards from No Man’s Land. This thesis is composed of there parts: the introduction provides explicit information to the author Aidan Chambers, the novel Postcards from No Man’s Land and the literature review on this novel at home and abroad; the body part is divided into three chapters which respectively deal with the narrative point of views---third-person limited point of view and first-person retrospective point of view and their effects, narrative techniques mainly from the perspective of intertextual narration, which consists of quotations, collage and parody and their effects, and other techniques from the aspect of language, including introduction of a new language system, word games and rhetorical devices. Then the author gives a conclusion that the techniques used in the narration can help deepen the themes of growth, war and memory and consciously manipulate the distance between characters and readers, leading readers to find the truth, instead of showing them, thus enhancing reading pleasure.