On The Open Narrative Of Coetzee "Elizabeth Costello: Eight Lessons"

J. M. Coetzee is an original South African writer with a complex identity. His many award-winning works have been wildly discussed and taken into textbooks for graduate students in the study of Anglo-American countries. Since he won the Nobel prize for literature in 2003, the introduction and research about Coetzee in China have gone deeper constantly. This paper mainly studies Elizabeth Costello and analyzed it in details from the narrative perspective. Coetzee's works have text narratives, showing an obvious postmodern style. The text of Elizabeth Costello is a unique curriculum structure, which is more experimental. In each class, the narrative technique is relatively original and there is a difference between classes. It is valuable in academics to analyze its artistic style from the perspective of narrative for Coetzee's works.This thesis consists of five parts: introduction, three chapters and conclusion.The introduction expounds the research status about Coetzee and his Elizabeth Costello studied by scholars at home and abroad and introduces the innovation of the paper briefly.The three chapter of the text: The first chapter analyzes the text structure of Elizabeth Costello. This chapter mainly researches the whole text from the start, and then analyzes it specifically. The first section studies the text type. The type division of Elizabeth Costello has been controversial because of the uniqueness of Coetzee's narrative. The paper studies the nature of the problem from the outside to the inside from the introduction of hot topics discussed by Chinese and foreign scholars. The paper shows the text construction of space in Coetzee's Elizabeth Costello from the study of text type to the characteristics of text space. The second section focuses on the specific text analysis. It analyzes the openness of the text through the characteristics of meta fiction. First, it analyzes the text with the creation idea of the “novel in the novel”. By adding the author's comments to the text, it breaks the fiction of the construction of the novel and brings into the author's comments. Secondly, it concerns the intertextuality in The Trial written by Kafka. The creation method of intertextuality in Coetzee's works is not uncommon, Elizabeth Costello is a good example.The second chapter analyzes the multiplicity of narrative perspective. It further demonstrates the narrative openness of Elizabeth Costello from the analysis of the whole narrative characteristics of the text into the narrative perspective. The first section focuses on the dynamic changes of the narrative focus. The work in the narrative perspective is different from the single focus of the traditional realism. Its focus on the subject and the perspective are changing to form the dynamic changes of the narrative focus. The second section studies the implied author. Implied author is a hot topic of narratology, Wayne Booth believed that there is an implied author between the real author and the narrator of the text. The implied author can be found through the deep analysis of Elizabeth Costello. The third section finds out the new features of Coetzee's texts-- not taking the reality of themselves fully into the text, but liking to adding the real self elements. The real implanted Coetzee elements can be found, while, characters in the novel is against the true courage of the author. Elizabeth was also given many real author elements, but she has the courage to make self-breakthrough to form the independent personality of the character.The third chapter analyzes the polyphonic spree of the thought. It studies the meaning of open narrative based on the previous two chapters and it studies mainly according to Bakhtin's theory of poetics. The first section uses the polyphonic novel theory of dialogue demonstration of the text. It analyzes from different perspectives of the dialogue in different spaces, including speech space, interview banquet space and self-dialogue and silence. The second section employs the carnival theory to analyze the ideological level of the whole works under the open condition of the narrative text. The demonstration starts from the perspective of the characters, and then goes into the creation of the fictional situation, until into the ideological level of the big carnival.The end-result of this paper is the openness of narrative text. The open narrative of Elizabeth Costello is studied and the uniqueness of Coetzee's works is analyzed through three chapters in order to further understand the diversification of J. M. Coetzee.