Alice Munro Short Stories' Narrative Research

Based on the narratology theories of Genette,Mieke Bal,Shen Dan and Zhao Yiheng,this paper conducts intensive reading of the text of Munro's works,and interprets and summarizes his narrative art from three levels: narrative perspective,narrative space-time and narrative structure.The first chapter examines Munro's short stories from narrative perspective,and discusses the transformation of perspective and the effect of this transformation on the expression of theme.Combined with Munro's narrative text,this paper analyzes the transformation of three main narrative perspectives in Munro's short stories and the special narrative effects of these different narrative perspectives.In the early creation process of Munro,the first-person experience perspective and the first-person retrospective perspective are often used so that readers can focus on other characters in the story through the narrator's perspective and directly perceive what the focuser knows and thinks.In addition,readers can constantly change their moods along with the narrator's thought and emotion,thus creating a narrative atmosphere full of ups and downs for the story.In addition,in many works of Munro,the interaction between two kinds of “limited knowledge” modes appears,namely,selective omniscient perspective and character limited perspective.The omniscient narrator and the story protagonist alternately act as the “observation eye”,which plays a very good role in expressing the theme meaning and enhancing the aesthetic appreciation.In the later period of Munro's creation,multi-character limited perspective is applied to make readers feel the collision of the same event under different perspectives which make readers deeply integrate into the novel and enhance the readability and interest of works.The second chapter discusses the space-time art of Munro's narrative from narrative time and narrative space.On the narrative time level,the frequent and smooth transformation of narrative time appears repeatedly in her novels,which enhances the readability of the text,arouses readers' interest,expands the narrative tension of the works and produces aesthetic effects.On the narrative space level,the description of natural space in Munro's works presents obvious regional characteristics,which gives people a sense of spatial edge.Munro integrates fragmented plots into the story space,and uses the physical space to convey the thought and emotion of the characters to shape the spiritual space of the characters.At the same time,the narrative space of Munro's works contains the metaphor of gender,which shows her concern and thinking for the situation of women.The third chapter analyzes the narrative charm of Munro's novels from the perspective of narrative structure.In the early period of Munro's novels,there are many linear structures that pay close attention to women's growth experience.However,in the later period,more attempts are made to nonlinear narrative structures,such as loop structure and double-line structure,which makes the content of the novels tighter and different clues reflect each other.At the same time,Munro often deliberately avoids the closed ending in her works and gives unlimited openness and possibilities in the abrupt ending of the story,which makes readers have unlimited imagination space.Through the adjustment and control of narrative perspective,narrative space-time and narrative structure,Munro puts these levels together in a very natural way so as to avoid the traditional narration in a straightforward way,forming the realistic effect of the novel and producing new meaning.