Narrative And The Reader Of Anne Enright's Novels

Anne Enright is one of Ireland's most remarkable and innovative writers,and her three novels:The Gathering(2007),The Forgotten Waltz(2011),and The Green Road(2015),all feature the constant narrative ruptures and temporal discordance.Based on the critical works of Peter Brooks,Philip Davis,and Jacque Derrida,this dissertation explores the connection between the narrative and the reader's experience,and how the dynamics of the narrative in these three novels influences the reader's level of meaning making.Brooks's focus on the dynamics of plot and the narrative desire for end goes beyond the static approach of the structuralist literary critics,and it furnishes insightful ideas for this dissertation's bridge between the narrative and the reader.Davis then provides possible effects literature exerts on the reader's meaning making,and answers in another way how the narrative influences the reader's meaning making.And Derrida's ideas about the specters and their uncanny impact on the present not only help to further understand the past experience and the temporal interruption,but also expand Davis's idea of the realm of the resonant.This dissertation is divided into five parts.Part One gives an introduction to the theoretical framework and the existing criticism on these three novels.Part Two analyzes the narrative and the reader's response in The Gathering.It examines the stasis of the"infinite moment" and investigates other forms of temporal disruption,as well as how the chronological disorder prompts the reader to explore the deep meanings.Part Three analyzes The Forgotten Waltz.It explores the narrative's ability to create a resonant place for the reader and sees three layers of possible meaning making:the interrogation of the certainty and the real,the appreciation of feminine aesthetics of the narrative,and the haunting.And Part Four analyzes The Green Road,presenting the reader's possible meaning making sparked by the chronological disruption or deviation.It provides new proofs of the resonance.The last part is the conclusion,which summarizes the thesis and further elaborates how narrative provokes the reader to consider ideas of memory,identity,and fiction.