| No Country for Old Men is the ninth novel of Cormac McCarthy,who is widely recognized as one of the most prominent contemporary American novelists.This book concerns an illegal drug trade and delineates a chaotic and decayed society on the border of Mexico-United States in the 1980s.In spite of its realistic setting,many elements in the novel cannot be explained in the realm of mimesis realists asserted.It is these unnatural elements that distinguish this book from realistic works and that arouse chaos and corruption to natural narratology.With the guidance of unnatural narratology,this thesis makes an attempt to examine these unnatural elements,spanning voices,plots and figures,and to probe into the epistemological concerns the author wants to convey in resorting to these unnaturalness.Chapter One of this thesis concentrates on the study of unnatural narrative voices,exploring frrstly its multi-person narration.A heterodiegetic narrator and a homodiegetic narrator depict a storyworld full of violence coordinately from different perspectives in the novel.Moreover,this thesis carries out an in-depth analysis on those transparent voices as well as second-person invasions for that these two narrators often lose control of their own voices.The tyranny of a powerful narrator is deconstructed,implicating thematically that the morality held as a belief by old men is not suitable for young generations anymore.The world is chaotic now and it is of futility to try to correct it with old principles.Chapter Two examines the unnatural plots.A linear narrative sequence is broken because of the intervention of unnatural voices.First of all,McCarthy multiplies the plots by breaking the ontological consistency of the storyworld.Moreover,variable plots are produced because scenes are scattered into pieces in the novel,and readers are invited to reorganize the fragmented events to conceive their own story.On the one hand,the disordered arrangement of events is an exemplification of McCarthy to deconstruct natural narrative,which is in favor of spontaneous conversational storytelling.This artful arrangement also foregrounds the chaotic societal concern of the author.On the other hand,McCarthy further invokes readers’ introspection on moral corruption by inviting them to be the creators of certain events.Chapter Three delves into story level to elaborate antimimetic figures in No Country for Old Men.Although protagonists are depicted as mimetic figures of the real world,Chigurh and Bell are endowed with so me traits beyond common people’s ability,thus imbuing them with conspicuous elements of unnaturalness.Chigurh gets superpowers in that violent society and has many incomprehensible motivations.His power is exaggerated by McCarthy to reveal that the devil is out of control.In contrast,the morality represented by Bell is marginalized.He can only voice his monologue in the.italicized text and has contradictory traits in two texts.The antimimetic characteristics of them echo the phenomena that the evil prevails while the good is in peril in storyworld.This thesis concludes that the three perspectives of unnatural narrative in No Country for Old Men are perceived as a way for McCarthy to deconstruct mimetic narrative and to broaden our cognitive recognition of literary narrative.In addition to that,the unnaturalness in the novel is an exemplification of chaotic situation where people feel inability,revealing McCarthy’s concern on amorality.McCarthy attempts appeal for moral awareness among people by employing unnatural narrative to achieve his didactic intention. |
