A Study Of The Narrative Strategies Of Nadine Gordimer's The Pickup:A Novel

Nadine Gordimer was the winner of the Nobel Prize in literature of 1991.She wrote 15 novels,20 short stories,more than 20 plays and reviews.Most of them are related to the political change in South Africa,the Apartheid,and the African people's well-being and so on,but after the middle of the 1990s,the focus on the political change in South Africa has been shifted to the depiction on the daily life of the people,among them,the conflicts between the White and the Black are the core of all her works.The narrative strategy adopted in the Pickup is in line with the identity confusion of the people living at the bottom of South African society.It is the ambiguity of the protagonist's identity that makes the narrative space,time,perspective and structure of the novel appear ambiguous.Therefore,with these four aspects,this paper plans to carry out a research on the novel,and the content is divided into seven parts.The introduction includes a brief review of Nadine Gordimer,the novel the Pickup and its research significance,and also a literary review on the cunrrent research situation of Nadine Gordimer and the Pickup.The first chapter points out that the story space includes the coffee shop,the tavern,the oases and desert.Julie,Moussa and "the Round Table" in the story space are full of doubts about their "identity",so they all want to find a new identity through the space relocation and obtain the appreciation of the Other.In the narrative space,the personal pronoun change creates an interaction between the narrator,characters and the narratee,and the narrative distance between them gives the text of the Pickup a sense of hierarchy and three-dimensional sense.The second chapter tries to explain that the chronology and the time period narration blurred the sense of time of the characters in the story time layer that indirectly reflected the identity confusion of the characters.In terms of the narrative time,the summary,pause and the discourse repetition extend the distance between the narrator and the characters,and also among the characters themselves,so as to show the emotional entanglement of the characters and their recognition and rejection of the heterogeneous cultures as a whole.Chapter three argues that the omniscient/limited perspective of the narrator on the characters highlights the cognitive differences between the Subject and the Object before and after the space relocation of the character.The dramatic perspective objectively shows the social environment of South Africa and the desert.The narrator not only disparages the uncoordinated social development of South Africa,but also highlights the concerns of the desert country.The slippage among the omniscient/limited and the dramatic perspective supply a better stand to perceive the characters' physical and mental changes and their motivations.Chapter four points out that the Chinese box structure and the compound line structure are the main structural features of the text.The Chinese box structure includes the story layer of the Julie,Moussa and Asch:the Julie layer is given priority to Julie's general emotional entanglements and her own psychological change;the Moussa layer can fill the blank Julie left with Moussa applying for the foreign passport alone;the Asch layer is mainly about Asch's daily life that is the source of the formation with Julie interracial opinions about love.These three layers are interconnected to serve the"relocation"narrative pattern of the story.Chapter five studies the narrative strategy of the Pickup from the perspective of Gordimer's fiction writing concepts,for the sake of better perceive her narrative intention and original motives of creation.The conclusion summarized the whole paper and points out the existing problems and deficiencies of this paper as well as the direction for further research in the future.