An Analysis Of Defamiliarization In The Lovely Bones

In 2002, Alice Sebold published her famous novel The Lovely Bones, which has been acclaimed by a large number of readers, and it immediately becomes a best-selling book and stays in the New York Times’s best-selling book list for more than one year. In The Lovely Bones, Alice Sebold exhibits fully her spirit of anti-tradition in narration, language and theme. She is an excellent writer with her unique technique and style. Since the publication of The Lovely Bones, the studies of the novel have been booming. However, few scholars have studied The Lovely Bones from the theoretical perspective of defamiliarization. This thesis attempts to provide a new approach to the interpretation of the novel by analyzing the novel from the perspective of defamiliarization technique. This thesis consists of an introduction, the main body and a conclusion. Its main contents are as follows:The first part is the introduction, which mainly makes a brief summary of the researches on The Lovely Bones domestic and overseas, and then points out the great significance and unique point of view of the analysis on the novel.The body of the thesis is composed of five chapters:Chapter One mainly gives an introduction to the theory of defamiliarization, discusses the concept of defamiliarization, and then looks back upon it’s origin, development and methods of defamiliarization.At first, the theory of defamiliarization was put forward by Victor Shklovsky to oppose the tenet of automatization both in daily life and in literary writing in his essay Art as Technique in 1917. In his opinion, the skill of art is to make objects’unfamiliar’, to make forms difficult and increase the perceived difficulty and span.Chapter Two concentrates on the technique of defamiliarization in narration in The Lovely Bones, through the angles of narrative structure, narrative perspective and narrator. The Lovely Bones is a brilliantly crafted and challengingly structured novel. The arrangement of events in The Lovely Bones is not presented chronologically but in a dislocated temporal scheme, the succession of events is broken up frequently and unexpectedly. In order to fully display the plots and the characters’inner thoughts. Sebold adoptes two kinds of narrative perspective to tell the stories in The Lovely Bones and switches the narrative perspective freely to realize the effect of defamiliarization. In addition, in The Lovely Bones, the story is narrated by a dead person, Susie Salmon. Let the dead speak, who is the unusual narrator is undoubtedly a defamiliarized way in the novel.Chapter Three focuses on language defamiliarization in the novel, Sebold uses the rhetorical devices, spectacular metaphors, symbols and similes to realize the language defamilirization. Readers will be impressed by the uniqueness of the language.Chapter Four deals with the issue of theme defamiliarization. The novel opens with a murder, but with the development of plot, the "murder" theme is obscured, what Alice Sebold really wants to express is letting go. Only by letting go could Susie free herself and go to the wide wide Heaven, Alice Sebold can forget the rape experience and continue to live her life. While the theme of family is displayed by the absence of a family member, although Susie was dead, her family would love her forever and the whole family would support each other to move on.Chapter Five discusses how the artistic effect of defamiliarization is achieved in The Lovely Bones. In the novel, Alice Sebold creates two heavens and adopts supernatural factors to control the aesthetic distance properly. The artistic value of defamilirization is realized through the uniqueness of the novel.The last Chapter is the conclusion, which makes a summary of the preceding parts. Based on the study of five chapters above, this thesis reaches a conclusion that the high literary value of The Lovely Bones attributes to the art of defamiliarization Alice Sebold has used in the novel. Alice Sebold has managed to endow her novel with singularity and originality by adopting various techniques of defamiliarization. All the techniques of defamiliarization increase the difficulty of understanding and prolong readers’ perception of the novel, at the same time, the novel’s artistic effect is achieved.