A Study Of The Narrative Features Of Raymond Carver’s Short Novels

As one of the most important writers in the revival of American short stories, Raymond Carver reveals the life and feelings of ordinary people from the lowest American society in twentieth century with a calm tone, reflects their mediocre、 vacuous and hopeless exist appearance. Carver shares a unique style on narrative technique.Using the method of text analysis, this article attempts to probe into the narrative features of Raymond Carver’s short novels in term of narrating to dig out the profound connotation and artistic value.The first chapter is introduction part which gives brief introduction of Carver’s life experience and work, the research status at home and abroad of carver’s short story and his creative style to expound the value and significance of research.The second chapter discusses the choice of characters and subject in Carver’s story combining with his life experience. He shapes images of ordinary groups struggling in the bottom of society, describes their meaningless and hopeless living condition, which has a close relationship with the author’s experience.The third chapter explains the openness narrative structure of Carver’s novels. He prefers semi-closed narrative structure rather than the traditional complete plot which mainly embodied in the arrangement of fragmentized plot and open-ending.The forth chapter works with the wordless of writer from aspect of narration skills. Carver keeps silence by restrictive narrative perspective、unreliable narration and narrative blank, providing readers more space to understand the story, making writer’s silence a kind of expression.