The Analysis Of Dual Narration In The Korean War Novel Letters From A Captive Heart

Letters from a Captive Heart is an American POW novel. It mainly narrates the life of American POWs in the Korean War and their relatives in the mainland through the dual narrative technique. The first kind of narrative view is the third person omniscient narration and it focuses on the two narrative views, out from the purpose of providing the objective and integrated narration. The second kind of narrative view is first person inner view of epistolary narration. Through the insertion of the epistolary narration, it not only enhances the reliability of the stories but also shortens the distance between readers and characters of the stories. The function of the insertion of the epistolary narration in the novel is to rouse readers’ sympathy to the characters of the stories. By analyzing the dual narration in Letters from a Captive Heart, it exposes author’s humanistic care to American POWs’ miserable fate and future life as well as their relatives. This dual narration technique reveals the reason why the Korean War is forgotten by Americans.This paper includes five parts. The first part is the introduction of this paper. It involves the literature review on the study of the Korean War POW novels and the research method and purpose of this paper. The second part analyzes the use of omniscient narrative view in Letters from a Captive Heart. First of all, it introduces two kinds of omniscient narrative views used in Letters from a Captive Heart which are God’s omniscient narrative view and the limited narrative view. Through the analysis of these two kinds of omniscient narrative view in Letters from a Captive Heart, the great contrast between the captive life of American POWs and the daily life of American citizens in the novel is revealed to readers. The third part focuses on the use of insertion of the epistolary narration in the novel. The first part of this section is the theory background of the epistolary narration. According to the types of epistolary novel, the paper classifies the letters in the novel into two types, the monologic letters and the dialogic letters. Through the analysis of the two types of letters, it exposes the reason of the insertion of the epistolary narration is the enhancement of the reality of the story which is narrated by the characters in Letters from a Captive Heart. After the analysis of previous three chapters of the paper, the fourth part reveals the value of the dual narration in the novel. One is about the diversity in the narration and the other is the author’s humanistic care to the POWs and their relatives. The last part is the conclusion of the whole paper. Through the narrative technique of dual narration, it not only exposes the cause of the Korean War as "Forgotten War" by Americans but also digs out the anti-war theme that the author aims to convey in the novel.