Narrative Focalization And Selfhood In The Stone Diaries

This thesis studies the female protagonist Daisy in Carol Shields' s novel The Stone Diaries,intending to figure out how the experimental deployment of narrative focalization contributes to constructing selfhood for Daisy.It argues that the multiplicity of focalizations helps illustrate the construction of Daisy's selfhood—the self is focalized by the character Daisy,the narrator Daisy and the other characters respectively—and thus endows Daisy with the capacity of self-narration from broader perspectives.We will then have a panoramic view of Daisy's personality: facilitated by her gift of imagination,Daisy does not shirk woman's dilemma in a patriarchal society through plunging into illusion but instead transforms her own life through self-narration.This thesis starts first with Daisy the character's internal focalization.The experiencing Daisy often masquerades as a third-person omniscient narrator and resorts to her imagination to recreate the consciousness of other characters.The actual audience are deceived into taking her ostensibly authorial narration as reality.Through transforming reality covertly in her storytelling,she demonstrates great resiliency in reconciling what she senses with what she desires and thus ease the anxiety afflicted by the social construct of exemplary femininity.Then the narrating Daisy's perspective is introduced to form a contrast with that of the experiencing Daisy.By the textual clues of inconsistencies and contradictions,the narrator discloses how Daisy the character manipulates the narration of events for self-realization and invites the actual audience into the process of interpretation.Besides,Daisy's interactions with other characters are presented to facilitate the understanding of her construction of personhood.She is portrayed through the letters and personal theories from other characters while her own responses are purposefully omitted in order to involve the actual audience to fill in the gap and contemplate the constructedness of selfhood themselves.To conclude,narrative focalization serves its thematic functions in the construction of selfhood for Daisy: it helps Daisy demonstrate her agency first in transforming the reality and further meditating on her such acts of transforming reality,and ultimately enable her to rise from a passive escapist to a self-conscious narrator.