Research On Narrative Characteristics Of Calvino's Short Stories

Italo Calvino(1923-1985)is a famous contemporary Italian novelist and one of the important representatives of the modernist writers in western literary circles.As a prolific writer,his novels are clever,imaginative,and full of wisdom,and also have bold and changing style,and transcend the traditional boundaries of realism and fantasy.Capable of telling stories,he also focuses on the creation of short stories,and conducts unremitting exploration in narrative techniques.With his short stories as the research object,their narrative art is analyzed from the narrative characteristics and the narrative theory so as to have more profound grasp of their narrative characteristics,and explore the psychological mechanism and theme in his art world.The narrative characteristics of Calvino's short stories are explored from the aspects of narrative perspective,narrative time and narrative structure.The first chapter discusses the characteristics of Calvino's short stories using the theory of narrative perspective.This chapter includes two parts.In the first part,the perspectives of his short stories are further divided into adult perspective,children perspective and animal perspectives according to the perspective bearer.It is thought that he sets the narrative perspective so as to serve for the theme.When he chooses adult perspective,the perspective bearers have a variety of identities,and the observed objects focus on the characteristics of private reflection.Moreover,the setting of anonymous person makes the perspective more obscure.When he adopts children perspective,children are victims and perpetrators,witnesses and the disregarded,and the setting of the kinship perspective makes full use of children perspective and serves different themes.From animal perspective,he focuses on the relationship between humans and animals,as well as humans and nature.The second part examines the consistency and inconsistency between narrator and observer through the distinction of them.After dividing his short stories based on the different narrative persons,and analyzing narrative perspective techniques,the author thinks that Calvino realizes the innovation of perspective in his short stories through the deviation between the narrator and observer.His short stories that adopt the first person's narration tend to separate the observer status from the protagonist,while the texts tend to be calm and rational.In addition,his short stories that adopt the third person's narration mainly apply the limited perspective,which makes the text perspective present the hidden characteristics.As a "voyeur",Calvino uses unique narrative techniques to permeate his understanding of survival,loneliness and war.Chapter Two discusses the characteristics of his short stories in terms of narrative time and speed.In this chapter,the author discusses the narrative characteristics of his short stories by combining with narrative theory,thinking that the narrative effect is achieved through "acceleration" and "deceleration".In particular,he has his own theory about time and speed between narrative time and story time,and he attaches more importance to deceleration or acceleration in practice.The first way to accelerate is to set story time within one day;the second way to accelerate is to expand the volume of space in the narration;the third way is to use quotes.These methods to accelerate the narrative speed enrich the artistic connotation of his short stories.Finally,"repetition of plots" and"plot narration free from the theme" proposed by Calvino are analyzed,and their effect in decelerating narration is studied.Chapter Three studies the narrative structure characteristics of Calvino's short stories.Through the analysis of the text in his short stories,the author believes that his short stories mainly adopt the three forms,namely,chain structure,zigzag structure and circular structure in terms of narrative structure.The children's games in the chain structure are often imitated from wars.In other words,he targets at the war and his mixed feelings about wars,rather than the games in the deeper meaning.In the zigzag structure,the things that Calvino doesn't know are also difficult to solve,and it is also a political metaphor from the narrative content,because a simple story has deeper implications.The life in the circular structure story includes the days when couples get together,which also shows Calvino's observation and exploration of gender relation.His structure points directly to the theme.In addition to books,he focuses on the thoughts and metaphors about war,politics,and gender relation.This chapter discusses the structure of his short stories from the significance of the theme based on the surface structure.The conclusion part points out that Calvino's short stories present the characteristics of concealment.The author argues that such concealment is not only reflected in the perspective of observation,but also in his grasp of narrative speed and the metaphorical nature of structure.From function,this kind of concealment improves the artistic quality of the texts,and makes the texts simple and implicit.More importantly,it implies the theme.Through superb narrative technique and interpretation of rhetoric technique,his short stories perfectly illustrate the themes,involving his depiction and thinking of difficult life,people's own loneliness(gap between interpersonal relationships)and reflection to the war,express his attention and sympathy of human living conditions,doubt about the distorted human nature,and appeal for returning to rationality.The author summarizes the artistic characteristics,and also explores,interprets and evaluates the theme connotation of his short stories based on the comprehensive analysis.