A Study On The Narrative Strategies In The Chronicles Of Narnia

The Chronicles of Narnia is a series of seven children's fantasy literary works created by British writer C.S.Lewis in the course of 1950 to 1956,which are The Lion,The Witch and the Wardrobe,Prince Caspian,Voyage of the Dawn Treader,The Silver Chair,The Horse and His Boy,The Magicians Nephew,The Last Battle.They have gained popularity from readers of different ages.Foreign scholars have published a number of monographs on this work,based on the perspectives of theology,philosophy,power,desire,gender,and love etc.Domestic research on this work started late,and most of the research content was published in the form of journal articles and master's thesis.The research perspective is mainly based on archetypal theory,ecological theory,and feminism theory.Although several MA theses studied this work from the perspective of narratology,there are still plenty materials in the text that are valuable to be discussed.This thesis will explore the reason that made The Chronicles of Narnia a classic of fantasy novel by analyzing the narrative strategies of the texts.This thesis consists of five parts.The first part is the introduction,which mainly introduces the life of the writer C.S.Lewis,the representative work The Chronicles of Narnia and the research comments on this work by scholars at home and abroad in recent years.It also introduces the theoretical framework of the theory and the research significance and framework of this thesis.In the first chapter,the author analyzes The Last Battle through the strategy of characterization,in order to prove that C.S.Lewis takes both the completeness of fiction structure and the verisimilitude of character into account in his writing to attract the readers‘ reading interests and their inner appeal of the moral ethics that good must defeat evil.The second chapter analyzes The Voyage of the Dawn Treader from the strategy of speech in narrative theory,in order to verify that the implied author‘s purpose is to guide the reader to identify with his moral concern.The third chapter analyzes The Silver Chair from the strategy of unreliable narration,based on two axes: fact/event axis and values/judgment axis,in order to prove that the implied writer‘s writing strategy to convey his moral concern to the common readers.The last part is the conclusion,which summarizes the narrative strategies in the novel,and points out that Lewis has successfully used these strategies to achieve the purpose of combining artistic and moral preaching.