A Study Of The English Version Of Chronicle Of A Blood Merchant From The Perspective Of Narratology

Yu Hua is a famous contemporary Chinese writer, and one of the representative writers of advant-garde literature. His works written in the 1980 s have revealed the ugly and dark side of human nature by using ruthless writing style. Evil, violence and death are often described in his novels. However, his works written after the 1990 s have been quite different from his previous works, especially To Live and Chronicle of a Blood Merchant. These works, which are close to the reality, show a kind of indifferent, firm and persistent power with a plain posture, and also display another narrative method. Chronicle of a Blood Merchant shows us the tough life and kind human nature when people face suffering, which is the eternal charm of this book. Once a French magazine commented on this book and said that it was ―an exquisite novel, and a perfect combination of simple, concise appearance and far-reaching connotation‖.The main line of Chronicle of a Blood Merchant is the fact that Xu Sanguan sold his blood for twelve times. This book told Xu Sanguan‘s hard life. Whenever his family encountered a crisis, he always sold his blood to cope with the emergency. In this book, the repetition of selling blood for 12 times, including the repetition of drinking many bowls of water before selling blood and eating stir-fried pork liver and drinking yellow rice wine after selling blood, continually deepens the theme of this book, and makes people realize that the essence of life is suffering. However, when people face suffering, they will produce strong desire for survival.As is known to all, narrative is quite important to fiction. In this book, Yu Hua adopted the narrative technique of repetition and gradually developed and deepened the theme of this book. In addition, Yu Hua mainly used the third-person external point of view to write this novel, but in some chapters, he also switched to internal point of view. In this way, he can reveal the characters‘ inner activities. This thesis compares and analyzes Chronicle of a Blood Merchant and its English version from three aspects of narrative theories: narrative time, narrative point of view and speech presentation. After careful analysis, the author has found that the translator did not completely retain the original text‘s narrative style. In terms of narrative time, the translator omitted some repeated paragraphs; in terms of narrative point of view, the translator sometimes kept the original point of view, while sometimes he changed it; in terms of speech presentation, the translator retained the original speech presentation in most cases, but he occasionally used different speech modes. The main reason is that he wanted to cater to target readers‘ reading habit and there are differences between Chinese and Western culture.This thesis aims to make people aware of the artistic value and profound meaning of Yu Hua‘s works by researching them, and also provide some reference for narrative study in fiction translation.