Representing Modern Anxiety:Reading Lorrie Moore's Birds Of America From Narratological Perspective

Lorrie Moore(1957-)is a famous American fiction writer mainly known for her humorous and poignant short stories.Birds of America(1998)is her widely acclaimed short story collection in which Moore retains the avian eyes to anatomize American life and vividly captures the anxiety of middle-aged Americans in their middle-class lives.This thesis attempts to analyze the representation of three kinds of anxiety in Birds of America and to discuss how different narrative strategies affect the readers' experience and understanding of these anxieties from the perspective of rhetorical narratology.The thesis first focuses on the representation of death anxiety.Through analyzing the character narration in“People Like That Are the Only People Here: Canonical Babbling in Peed Onk” and “Dance in America,” chapter two points out that by employing characters to tell their stories,Moore invites the audience to emotionally engage in the characters' death anxiety in what they have told and meanwhile to intellectually participate in their process of telling in order to detect thenarrator's attitude and changes to such unease.This thesis then focuses on the representation of relationship anxiety.Through examining the selective omniscience in “Charades” and “Community Life,” chapter three proposes that Moore penetrates the thoughts and feelings of one character to clearly expose modern people's relationship anxiety,and meanwhile invites the readers to make narrative judgments during the reading process to discern that one's distorted perception contributes greatly to the disconnection of interpersonal relationship.This thesis finally focuses on the representation of existential anxiety.Through analyzing the character construction in “Real Estate” and “Terrific Mother,” chapter four maintains that Moore constructs the characters freighted with thematic weight to concretely represent the existential anxiety and invites the audience to ruminate on the causes of this unease.This thesis concludes that with these narrative strategies,Moore provides a panorama of middle-class Americans' state of being in the late twentieth century — restless,lonely and lost,and guides the readers to participate in the narrative to perceive the causes and cure of anxiety and to find inner peace and happiness.