The Narrative Arts Of Alice Munro's Short Fictions

Alice Munro(1931—) is one of the most prestigious Canadian female novelists in the international literary world, who is well-known for her short fictions writing. Munro won countless awards during her writing period, including the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2010. She always depicted and portrayed panorama of ordinary life in a small town via delicate and exquisite narrative arts, which brought the spiritual and reading resonance to readers.Dance of the Happy Shade and Too Much Happiness are two representative works among Munro's multitudinous collections, which are finished in her early and later years respectively,and both won the Governor General's Award. The stories in such two collections highly symbolized Munro's writing style. Although Munro was explored in full swing by abroad scholars, domestic researches were still at an elementary stage, especially the immature studies of narrative arts in her short fictions. This thesis is based on Gerard Gentte's and Shen Dan's theories as well as some other relevant theories on narratology,and by adopting research techniques like close reading or induction, the thesis has analyzed Alice Munro's narrative arts in some typical short stories from the above two collections,such as "Boys and Girls","Face","Walker Brothers Cowboy" etc.From three significant narratological aspects such as narrative focalization, time and voice, this thesis comprehensively probed into Munro's narrative strategies or writing styles in several short fictions. This thesis started from the introduction to Alice Munro's life and her two collections of Dance of the Happy Shade and Too Much Happiness, as well as the general analysis of literature review about Munro's researches. First of all, the thesis gave an in-depth study of Alice Munro's tactful arrangements of characters'viewpoints mainly from narrative focalizations, like the concepts of zero focalization,internal focalization and external focalization etc. Meanwhile, through exploring the free transformations among psychological cognitive focalization and outside perceptual focalization,this part is aimed to summarize the diversity and innovation of the narrative focalization in Munro's work. From Munro's techniques of narrative time like sequence,duration and frequency, then it has analyzed the volatility of time in narrative arts. And it proves that appropriate transformation of narrative sequence and frequency enhanced the artistry of Munro's works, highlighted the theme and enriched the connotation. Finally,thesis has deeply explored different expressions in terms of characters' discourses in Munro's works from the aspect of narrative voice, finding that Munro has adopted public voice, hidden voice or even unreliable voice to show that narrator sometimes hid,sometimes appeared. All these demonstrated reliability and unreliability in narrative characteristics and manifested distinctive narrative effects. The conclusion part of this thesis arrived at the whole summary of this paper and a further generalization about Alice Munro's narrative arts.