A Study Of The Kite Runner From The Perspective Of Genette's Narrative Theory

Khaled Hosseini is the most influential America Afghan writer who is best known for his Afghanistan Trilogy,namely The Kite Runner,The Mountains Echoed and A Thousand Splendid Suns.As an immigrant writer who has absorbed both Eastern and Western cultures,Hosseini's portrayal of the Afghan society is unique and nuanced.With strong empathy toward the Afghan community,he employs delicate narratives to accurately represent his people and culture and to give them a voice in literature.He undertakes the responsibility of constructing a positive image of Afghanistan,while trying to avoid readers' prejudice and demonization of Afghanistan by the Western hegemony.Although Hosseini is by no means a prolific writer,all his works are highly favored.His debut,The Kite Runner came out in 2003.Upon release it garnered great attention around the world,ranking the Amazon list for 131 weeks,and came first in the New York Times bestseller for two consecutive years and even appeared twice on the president's recommended list for readers to read.More than 7 million copies of the book have been sold in the US alone,and more than 20 million copies sold worldwide,translated into 42 languages.As a result,scholarship and criticism on Khaled Hosseini and his works gained momentum in recent years.In this thesis,I seek to understand Khaled Hosseini and his novel The Kite Runner in a new light.This thesis treats of The Kite Runner from a narratological perspective by using Gerard Genette's narrative theories including narrative time,narrative focalization and narrative discourse.In Introduction,I make an overview of the status of the field,with special attention to The Kite Runner.In Chapter One,I draw on the tenets of Gerard Genette's critical narrative theories to construct a workable analytical framework.In Chapter Two,I analyze the narrative time in three sub-branches,which are,time order,time duration and time frequency.In Chapter Three,I elaborate on narrative focalization from the fixed internal focalization and variable internal focalization,as represented in The Kite Runner.In Chapter Four,I concentrate on the narrative discourse employed by Khaled Hosseini in the novel,mainly from three aspects,namely,narrated speech,transposed speech and reported speech.By so doing,I probe into the working mechanisms of how these narrative strategies employed by Hosseini contribute to the enormous success of the novel.