A Study Of The Narrative Strategy In The God Of Small Things From The Perspective Of Rhetorical Narratology

Indian novelist Arundhati Roy’s Booker prize-winning novel The God of Small Things has enjoyed a high literary reputation worldwide since its publication in 1997.Scholars have highlighted its unique narrative structure,thematic depth and especially its poignant exposition of the contemporary Indian society.Centering on a fated and forbidden relationship between a high-caste Syrian-Christian divorcee,Ammu,and a low-caste "untouchable" carpenter,Velutha,the novel delineates the history of a prominent family in decadence.In its affective structure and poetic narrating,The God of Small Things is heartbreakingly tied to love,loss and remembrance.In a broader concern,Roy reflects the ingrained unjust in both the nation’s history and its present comprehensively and powerfully in the novel.Arundhati Roy is exceptional in her narrative excellence of innovative language style and intricate cyclic structure.Based on James Phelan’s rhetorical theory of narrative mainly,and with the methodology of structuralist narratology as complement,this thesis analyses the focalization mode,narrative progression and narrative ethics of the novel,from which specific rhetorical effects are produced.Besides,taking the role of audience into account,the thesis provides a comprehensive interpretation of the multileveled relationship among the author,the audience and the narrative text.This thesis is composed of six chapters.Chapter One introduces The God of Small Things,its author Arundhati Roy,and the previous scholarship both home and abroad.Chapter Two expounds Phelan’s rhetorical theory of narrative and related concepts of classical narratology that this thesis concerns,and explains why Phelan’s rhetorical theory is feasible to the study of The God of Small Things.The subsequent three chapters investigate Roy’s narrative strategy considering respectively the narrative focalization,narrative progression and narrative ethics of the novel.Adopting a focalization mode that shifts from the external narrator focalizer to the internal character reflector,the narrative frequently leaps between the narrative present and the past,indicating the incurableness of trauma resulted from past events and lasting to the twins’ adulthood.Besides,Roy’s novel is characterized by the author’s talented and creative arrangement of instabilities within/between/among characters in respect of textual dynamics,which enhances the overall effect of the narrative by the interrelated reactions among the different elements within the text and among the narrative agents of the author,the text and the audience.Finally,Roy’s ethical strategy exerts as a means of thematic and aesthetic disclosure,which has strengthened the aesthetic impact of the novel on the one side,and challenged the ethical norms among the discrepant individual readers on the other.Chapter Six is the conclusion.With her exquisite and experimental narrating techniques,Roy rewrites the historical text of the post-independent India in her exposing of the established laws and deep-rooted inequality of Indian society,where the "Small Things" are under tremendous oppression of the "Great".The ingrained caste and social stratum not only predestines the tragedy of Roy’s story,but also shadows the contemporary Indian society.And it is in the transgression and resistance of the "Small things" that the hope of change lies.