Narrative Techniques In Richard Yates’s

The thesis aims to explore narrative techniques in Richard Yates’s Revolutionary Road,The Easter Parade,and Cold Spring Harbor.Richard Yates is an American novelist and short-story writer,also known as the representative writer in "Age of Anxiety".The selected novels in this thesis are the representative works of Yates in different stages.These novels continue the concise,plain-spoken and sad style,representing Yates’s different statuses of his writing career.They also share similarities and differences in narrative.It is worth to notice that critics and scholars mainly apply to approaches of feminism,existentialism,ethic relations,and so on to analyze Yates’s novels.However,little study focuses on narratology in Yates.Based on foreign and domestic researches,this thesis will explore narrative techniques in Yates.The thesis mainly employs Genette’s classical narratology theory,mainly including focalization,order,duration,and frequency to analyze Yates’s novels;besides,the thesis also takes Bal’s and Rimmon-Kenan’s explanations and modifications towards Genette’s theory.Besides introduction and conclusion,the thesis will be divided into three parts.Chapter Two mainly discusses focalization,including zero focalization,internal focalization and external focalization employed in Yates.By analyzing focalization,readers can get better understanding of motifs and characteristics.Chapter Three focuses on chronological disorder in these three novels.With changeable time arrangement,Yates presents his unique and talented writing skills.Chapter Four analyzes narrative rhythm,including both duration and frequency.Different narrative techniques contribute to narrative rhythm changes,acceleration and deceleration.From the above analysis,we can conclude that applications of narrative techniques represent deep motifs and complicated emotions.Richard Yates is extremely admirable at narrative techniques,conveying his own thoughts of marriage,love,and kinship.Yates’s deep cognition of loneliness and anxiety is represented in his works,in which the loneliness of Americans after the Second World War is veritably represented.In addition,personal limited cognition results in the impossibility of communication,which aggravates the sense of loneliness among modern people.