An Analysis Of Narrative Strategies Of Alice Munro’s Short Stories Based On Genette’s Narrative Theories

As a "master of the contemporary short story",Alice Munro,a Canadian writer,was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in October,2013.She won a reputation of"Canadian Chekhov" due to her brilliant narrative techniques.Her irregular narrative order,the polytropic narrative speed and flexible transformation of narrative focal ization and distance made every aspect of her narrative world worthy of serious studies.However,the studies of Alice Munro and her works at home still stay in the initial stage,while the relevant studies abroad are flourishing.Most domestic studies of her narrative strategies focuses on her early works and few use classical narrative theory to analyze her narrative techniques.Therefore,it is significant to adopt Gerard Genette’s classical narrative theories analyzing the narrative techniques of Alice Munro in her recent short stories.Based on Gerard Genette’s narratology theory and by adopting the research methodologies like close-reading textual analysis,this dissertation intends to analyze Alice Munro’s Dimensions,Tricks and Amundsen from the perspective of narrative time,narrative focalization and narrative distance as the sequence in Narrative Discourse.The purpose of the analysis is to find out the common features of the narrative strategies in these stories and the effects of such arrangements.In regard to the construction of this dissertation,this dissertation falls into five parts.The first part is the introduction,including that of Alice Munro and her works,literature review on the study object,a general review of Genette’s narrative theories,significance and structure of the dissertation.In the following three parts,this paper applied Gerard Genette’s narratology theory to illustrate Munro’s narrative strategies in Dimensions,,Tricks and Amundsen hoping to present Munro’s marvelous narrative strategies and the unique narrative style.Chapter Two explored the narrative time in Dimensions,including the time order and duration in an effort to analyze the effect they take in shaping the characteristics of the character and portraying the character,features.By adopting the two-story line,a fragmentary and disjointed sense is presented.Moreover,the transitions between the two-story line in the story highlight the thinking on the past by the narrator or the major character so as to create multiple layers of meaning for the story.Chapter Three discussed the narrative focalization in Tricks,including zero focalization,internal focalization and external focalization and their functions in revealing the complicated psychology of characters.The combination of different narrative focalization provides a complete portrait of the realities of characters and generates intimacy between readers and the story.Chapter Four focused on Amundsen’s narrative distance,including narratized speech,transposed speech and dramatic reported speech and gave examples of them respectively.Different sorts of narrative discourse in Amundsen give mutual understanding of the story to readers as well as help them to read main characters’ thoughts from a new perspective.The last part is the conclusion,including a summary of the whole dissertation and its limitations.