A Study Of The Metafictional Narrative Techniques In Jeanette Winterson’s Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit

Jeanette Winterson is a brilliant contemporary British female writer.She is praised as one of the "Best of Young British Writers" by the literary magazine Granta.Because of her being keen on the lesbian subjects and innovative writing techniques,she has been regarded as the most controversial and creative writer in Britain.Her maiden novel as well as her representative work Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit is a semi-autobiography which won Whitbread First Novel Award in 1985.So far,many studies on this novel are from the perspectives of lesbianism,feminism,postmodernism and gender identity.Very few can be found on its metafictional narrative techniques.Based on Patricia Waugh’s theory of metafiction,this thesis tries to analyze the metafictional narrative techniques employed in this novel from three aspects:self-reflexivity,embedded structure and parody.Firstly,metafiction is also called self-reflexive novel.In Oranges,the first person narrator is not only a narrator but also the critic of the novel.She creates a fiction and simultaneously makes comments on the creation of that fiction.She often exposes narrative traces and her train of thought to remind the reader that she is telling a story.The self-reflexivity of the novel is mainly represented by the self-conscious narrator.Secondly,the narrator is also the heroine of the novel.Throughout the seemingly autobiographical narration,Winterson blurs the line between autobiography and fiction by embedding facts with fictive ingredients,which forms a kind of structure of "texts in texts,stories within stories".Thirdly,the novel shows a parody of the first eight books of Old Testament both in the structure and the content.Besides,Winterson also makes parodies of several fairy tales and legends to sublime the theme.All these have showed the main characteristics of metafiction:combining narrative with criticism within the novel,breaking the frame narrative constantly and exposing the fictionality of the novel self-consciously.Hereby this thesis reveals Jeanette winterson’s writing innovation and her critique of mainstream ideology.