Narrative Strategy Analysis On Doris Lessing’s Alfred And Emily

As a 2007 Nobel Prize winner in literature, Doris Lessing’s novels and short stories attract a lot of interest. Her last work Alfred and Emily is a hybrid of novella and memoir, which is a daring innovative attempt on genre. However, up till now few researches were conducted on this book at home.The thesis interprets Alfred and Emily by Gérard Genette’s narrative theory. It especially employs relative narrative terms such as order, duration, frequency, focalization and voice to analyze the narrative strategies in it and finds that there is a possible relationship between the story and the means of telling the story. The formal analysis focuses not only on the novella, but also on the memoir. Since the study about the narrative strategies of memoir is scarce at home, the thesis enriches the future study of Doris Lessing.There are six chapters in this thesis.Chapter I is an introduction. In this part, a life story is told about Doris Lessing and Alfred and Emily is introduced. Furthermore, the chapter presents a systemic literature reviews from home and aboard on Alfred and Emily. Last but not least, the academic significance and research method are introduced.Chapter II is the theoretical framework. First, there is a short introduction about Gérard Genette and his narrative theories. Then, some relative narratological terms that were used in the thesis will be explained in great details, especially those Genette put forward in his Narrative Discourse.Based on Genette’s narrative theory, the thesis has a detailed formal analysis of the narrative strategies in Alfred and Emily from three broad categories: narrative time, narrative mood and narrative voice.In chapter III, the thesis discusses three basic concepts: order, duration, and frequency under the term of narrative time. The thesis notices that the narrative in novella mainly follows a sequential time order, however, at the same time she uses a variety of other narrative strategies such as analepses, prolepses, summary, ellipsis, repetition and so on to create a narrative rhythm. In contrast, in the memoir, the narrative is chaotic in terms of narrative time. And that’s a typical narrative strategy for such a genre.In chapter IV, the thesis uses Genette’s focalization theory to analyze the different narrative focalizations used in Alfred and Emily, such as zero focalization, external focalization and internal focalization. The narrative in novella mainly adopts zero focalization, however, occasionally adopts fixed internal focalization. Fixed internal focalization allows the author to walk into a single character to reveal his/her inner thought. But, due to the imperfectness of Genette’s theory, the thesis borrows the concept of first-person external focalization from Shen Dan to analyze the memoir. And the thesis holds the opinion that first-person external focalization colors the work with strong reminiscence. Moreover, during the process of narrating, the author “I” consciously make comments which provide a more personalized perspective for us to understand the details of the characters.In chapter V, the thesis discusses the heterdiegetic narrative in Alfred and Emily: a novella and homodiegetic narrative in Alfred and Emily, two lives. By distinguishing the narrator’s voice and author’s voice in novella, the thesis finds that “I” is not actually Doris Lessing herself. The author is absent from the narrative. It is precisely her absence that confers on the quality which has been called “omniscience”. In contrast, homodiegetic narrative in memoir finds a protagonist-narrator, that is to say, the author’s voice is exactly the narrator’s voice.In chapter VI, from the above mentioned analysis, the thesis comes to the conclusion that Doris Lessing’s tactful narrative strategies not only promote the development of plot but also turn a family story into a provoking one, successfully drawing our attention to issues such as marriage, family, women and war. In summary, the narrative strategies of Alfred and Emily play a very important role in narrative developing and theme presenting.