A Study Of Narrative Strategies In David Lodge's Changing Places

David Lodge is one of the most outstanding writers in the 20~thh century,whose contributions to literature not only limited to literary creation but also criticism.Changing Places:A Tale of Two Campuses is the first novel written by David Lodge in campus trilogy.The novel has gained a great success since its publication and won Yorkshire Post Book Awards and Hawthornden Prize.Changing Places marks the maturity of Lodge's fictional writing skills and helps to establish his reputation as a popular novelist in English and a leading writer of campus novels.It tells a hilarious account of a six-month academic exchange programme between the two professors of two different countries.Based on the theory of Genette and others,this study takes Changing Places as the research object and aims to have an interpretation of narrative strategies from narrative focalization,narrative time and narrative mode,which will achieve a better and deeper appreciation of Lodge's narrative effects.In the aspect of narrative focalization,David Lodge doesn't adopt a single narrative focalization but three different types of focalizations(zero focalization,internal focalization and external focalization).This chapter will respectively analyze narrative effects of the novel from those three aspects.First,the novel uses zero focalization to provide abundant background information,shape and rich character images.Second,the narrative mode of internal focalization enables the narrator to switch flexibly under multiple narrative perspectives,which achieving effects such as highlighting the subjectivity,dramaticity,authenticity and flexibility of the narrative.Third,the emphasis on external focalization displays the ups and downs of the plots.In the aspect of narrative time,David Lodge discards the linear time arrangement in the traditional novel but takes a new method(time order,time duration and time frequency)to deal with the problem of time.The application of analepsis and prolepsis could show the background of the story and arouse the reader's interest.The usage of ellipsis,summary,scene and pause could help readers to grasp the rhythm of the text and make the whole text tense.Through the relationship between the events and the number of events in Changing Places,which highlights the historical background of the story and embodies the theme that the loss of the intellectuals and the satire on them.In the aspect of narrative mode,Changing Places contains a special mode from conflict to integration.The conflict and integration of mode in Changing Places are mainly reflected in three aspects:cultures,characters and writing skills.First,from a cultural perspective,it mainly includes British and American culture,highbrow and lowbrow culture,which points out the collision and integration of culture.Second,from the aspect of characters,through the binary relationship between Swallow and Zapp,Hilary and Desiree,it points out the narrative effects that the irony of intellectuals and the theme of cultural fusion in the novel.Third,from the analysis of writing styles,it mainly takes realism and post-modernism as an example to dig out Lodge's thoughts on the integration of the two.Through the study from three aspects of narrative focalization,narrative time and narrative mode,the unique narrative techniques and themes of Changing Places will be revealed.On one hand,it not only reflects the corrupt and depravity of the academic circle represented by Swallow and Zapp,as well as the inner anxiety and existence predicament of modern people but also shows the writer's attention and thinking about the spiritual crisis of the western society;on the other hand,it warns people not to lose themselves into private desire.People should actively seek out a way out of the predicament.