Exploring Alienating Narrative Strategies Of The Glass Menagerie

Tennessee Williams is one of the most prominent American playwrights in the 20th century. Throughout his whole dramatic career, he created numerous works, many of which are regarded as classics in the history of American drama. Apart from drama, he was also engaged in the writing of short novels and poems, which demonstrated his versatility and artistic vitality.The Glass Menagerie is acknowledged as Williams’first masterpiece. The opening night for the play in Chicago was an immediate success that attracted great acclaims. Since then, Williams has gradually risen to fame, drawing wide attention from the American theatre. New breakthroughs in the study of this famous play are continually made by scholars both at home and abroad. While most researches have been conducted on the autobiographic elements, themes, artistic forms, characters and so on, the unconventional use of narrative strategies in the play has drawn little scholarly attention. This may have resulted from the traditional exclusion of drama from narrative literature. Luckily, the concept of narrative is redefined in post-classical narratologies, and some post-classical narratologists have already shown interest in the narrative features of drama and their functions. And this is exactly the subject of the present study. This thesis is to analyze the "alienating" narrative strategies in The Glass Menagerie and their internal connection with the themes of the play on the bases of narratological theories on narrator, focalization and narrative time, and Brecht’s theory of alienation effect.The thesis consists of five chapters. Chapter One is Introduction, which gives a brief introduction to Tennessee Williams’life and dramatic career and a general survey of previous studies on The Glass Menagerie. It also explains the focus and structure of the thesis.Chapter Two mainly deals with the double narrators of The Glass Menagerie. One is the undisguised character-bound narrator and the other the disguised implied in the stage directions. Traditionally, the story of a drama is presented through characters’ dialogues and actions, and stage directions mainly describe the stage and technical equipment. Naturally the existence of double narrators in this play creates the alienation effect, defamiliarizing readers with the dramatic text and distancing them from the storyworld. Furthermore, they enhance this estrangement by means of foreshadowing and hinting at possible endings. Readers, therefore, do not get too much involved in the storyworld, but maintain their own perspectives which help them discover the play’s hidden themes.Chapter Three analyzes the multiple focalizations in The Glass Menagerie and their functions. On one hand, the internal focalization describes and creates characters, impressing the readers with negative images. On the other hand, zero and external focalizations, confiding to readers more details, show a more panoramic view of characters compared with the presentation of internal focalization. The frequent shifts between and transgressions of perspectives further highlight the discrepancy in characterization, alienating the reader from the characters, so that he will constantly question and rectify his previous assumptions about them. Through the special treatment of focalization, Williams, in a gesture of deep concern about the marginalized, guides the reader to look beneath characters’ appearance for their inner struggles and sorrows.Chapter Four aims at the narrative time of The Glass Menagerie. The play deviates from the traditional time framework—one-way, linear and continuous—which is based on the causality of plot. As a memory play, it reverses the beginning and the ending, interspersed with alternations between the past and the present, which prevents the story from moving on and the reader from being engaged in the story, thus creating the alienation effect. Through the special treatment of narrative time, Williams gives prominence to the clash between the northern industrial and the southern traditional cultures, and exposes the southerner’predicament at the historical turn. Denied an ultimate answer to the southerner’s problem, the reader is motivated to think of a solution by himself.Chapter Five is Conclusion, which summarizes the previous discussions and draws a conclusion about the alienating narrative strategies of The Glass Menagerie—Williams manipulates narrative elements of his text to alienate his reader from the storyworld, leading him to a new interpretation of all elements in the play including the events, characters and the drama itself and to an understanding of the hidden sexual oppression theme, humanistic concern and the playwright’s critical thinking on the intertwined southern and northern cultures.