An Analysis Of Narrative Features In The Joy Luck Club

The Joy Luck Club, which tells moving stories about four pairs of mothers and daughters, is a famous novel written by a Chinese American writer, Amy Tan. The novel reveals severe conflicts between Chinese and Chinese American cultures by describing complicated relationships between Chinese mothers and Chinese American daughters. It tells how they communicate and introject at last. This book is a wonder of Chinese American literature. It has been on the list of the New York Times best-selling books for 40 weeks, and also been nominated and then selected as a finalist for the “National Book Award” and the “National Book Critics Circle Award”, etc. Therefore, The Joy Luck Club is a remarkable representation of Chinese American fiction in American Literature.Narrotology is a study subject to focus on research in narrating. Its focus deconstructs and reconstructs the texts of works, thus retrieving valuable insight into the fiction. Based on theories of narrotology put forward by domestic and foreign scholars, such as Genette and Shen Dan.This thesis analyzes The Joy Luck Club from three aspects of narrative features: structure, strategy and language. The thesis shows The Joy Luck Club applied various narrative structures(multi-leves structure, embedded structure, and block structure) to display the whole storylines free access between the past and modern time. Meanwhile, Tan also used different kinds of narrative strategies, for example, the change of temporal and spatial order, and the change of the first-person of external and internal perspective. Besides, Tan combined the text full of traditional Chinese language elements, which showed the whole life experience of three generations of Chinese females. It is necessary to analyze the narrative features to understand this novel.Except for the introduction and conclusion, this thesis is divided into four chapters. Chapter one mainly deals with the basic information about The Joy Luck Club and Amy Tan. Then it gives an introduction to the researching status quo of The Joy Luck Club, and the theoretical foundation of this thesis. Chapter two analyzes three kinds of narrative structures existing in the novel—the multi-level, embedded and block. Chapter three mainly makes a discussion on the narrative strategies of the novel, which contain the temporal and spatial arrangement strategy,and narrative perspectives. Chapter four lays its focus on the narrative language of The Joy Luck Club which includes two parts: the application of Chinese linguistic elements and the presentation of concise and feminine linguistic styles. In conlusion, it draws the final conclusion that Amy Tan is a highly skilled author and shows that The Joy Luck Club presents a very high level of unity of the text in both form and content.