A Space Narratology Study On Don DeLillo's White Noise

Contemporary American writer Don DeLillo is one of the distinguished representative writers of postmodern fiction.Among his works,the eighth novel White Noise published in 1985 brings him American National Book Award.Today,it has been regarded as literary cannon and also an outstanding representative of postmodern literature since it was published.Through the description of daily lives of Jack's family and town's residents,White Noise not only draws a plentiful picture of American social life in the 20th century,but also displays the real living conditions of human in postmodern society.Thereby.DeLillo precisely reveals physical and spiritual harm to human brought by modern civilization,and also presents human's panic and helplessness when facing with death,belief,disaster and violence.White Noise does a prophetic prediction of the survival dilemma of postmodern human.Although White Noise has been attached a relatively extensive attention,the author of this thesis still conducts a further study on it from a new perspective of space narratology to present DeLillo's excellent spatial narrative techniques and enriches its research angles,which must be meaningful and valuable to the comprehensive and systemic study of this masterpiece.Moreover,study on White Noise is helpful for readers to know both people's living conditions in American society and human's lives in the whole postmodern society as well as their living crises and mental states.On the basis of Gabriel Zoran's theory,the thesis analyzes White Noise to display the construction of narrative space in the novel and the significant contribution of the space arrangement to the meaning generation and theme expression.The thesis consists of six parts.The first part is introduction,which introduces Don DeLillo and White Noise in detail,and does a literature review on White Noise according to the current research status at home and abroad.The second part briefly clarifies the development of space narratology and makes a specific explanation of Gabriel Zoran's theory.The parts covering third to fifth are the main body of this thesis.Based on Zoran's theory,the novel is analyzed from three aspects of topographical level,chronotopic level and textual level.The third part mainly discusses topographical space features in the novel.The construction of topographical space including living space,working space and leisure space shows the love absence in family,power discipline in working place and value decadence in ideology.The fourth part focuses on Chronotopic space in the novel.Chronotopic space involving residents,vehicles and roads reveals a postmodern living condition in which death is everywhere,moreover,it displays human's fear and helplessness of death.The fifth part presents the textual space in the novel.The selective images,the broken linearity of narration and the changing perspectives contribute together to the construction of a disconnected textual space,which promotes the expression of themes of consumer panic of postmodern human society and the potential risk brought by advanced science and technology etc..The sixth part is the conclusion of thesis.From the perspective of space narratology,the author discusses the construction of three distinct space levels including topographical space,chronotopic space and textual space in the novel,by which successfully presents the narrative space constructed in White Noise and especially illustrates whose significant effects on promoting the novel's meaning generation and theme expression.