A Study On The Rhetorical Narrative Of The Blind Assassin

The thesis applies some key elements of James Phelan's rhetorical theory of narrative,which consist narrative progression,narrative judgment,narrative ethic and character narration,to Margaret Atwood's masterpiece The Blind Assassin.By means of textual interpretation of the renowned novel,I try to take a peep at Atwood's advanced concepts of writing and more importantly,figure out the artistic merits of The Blind Assassin as a narrative.This thesis is composed of introduction,main body and conclusion.The main body is divided into three chapters.Chapter One traces the narrative progression of the first narrative,taking the death of Laura and the relationship of Iris and Laura as a clue.This chapter takes textual logic,readers' reactions and judgments all into horizon.Chapter Two is about the character narration of The Blind Assassin.Specifically,this chapter decodes the unreliable narration and mask narration of Iris,the character narrator of the novel.Chapter Three focuses on the narrative ethics of The Blind Assassin,consisting ethics of the told and ethics of the telling two parts.Part one sets relationships of the core character Iris and the other characters as a baseline,analysing the maturity route of Iris as an individual.Part two talks about the aesthetic and ethical issues about the intentionally delayed disclosure of the actual author who writes the novel-within-the-novel.The narrative progression theory of James Phelan provides theoretical support for finding out the textual progression of the primary collision in the whole book,that is,the collision between Laura and Iris.James Phelan's character narration theory plays essential role in analysing Iris' s unreliable narration.Meanwhile,the implied author,Margaret Atwood and the narrator Iris expose two different purposes through one single text,which is a lively illustration of the power and attraction of narrative.The narration ethic theory helps us figure out the ethical values embedded in textual phenomena and these values are totally the ones that the author desires to communicate to readers.