Stream Of Consciousness And Image Construction:A Study On The Sound And The Fury From The Perspective Of Metafunction

Stream of consciousness novels generate discourse in the context created by consciousness,and reflect characters’ mental features through the discourse,so as to realize image construction.The metafunction theory summarizes three basic functions of people’s use of language for information expression,relationship establishment and background cohesion,which is helpful for functional analysis of discourse.Then,using this theory to analyze the discourse meaning of characters,so as to summarize the discourse and mental features of characters,researchers can clarify characters’ image reflected by their languages.Then,image construction pattern in stream of consciousness novels can be summarized.Taking the classic stream of consciousness novel The Sound and the Fury written by William Faulkner as the research object,this thesis adopts corpus-based approach,collecting all the words of Caddy.The researcher makes a qualitative,quantitative and comparative analysis of her words with the help of ideational and interpersonal metafunctions,and summarizes Caddy’s images and the changes in her different life periods.Through the successful exploration of Caddy’s images,this thesis summarizes the realization pattern and research methods towards character image construction in stream of consciousness novels.The conclusions are as follow: First,image construction process in stream of consciousness novels can be fully explained from the perspective of metafunction.Writers shape characters’ image by delivering coherent meta-functional meanings in character’s discourse and reflecting their mental features.Second,exploring the register features of stream of consciousness novels is significant for image analysis.The framework of stream of consciousness corresponds to the register features of the novel,while character images is reflected in themes and relationships in different registers.Third,Caddy’s words in different periods reflect her different personalities.In childhood,transitivity processes are various,with many participants,and most of mood and modality in her speech are commands and assertions,creating positive,confident and rebellious images.In youth,themes are narrowed and verbal clauses are shorter;the modality and intention expressions decrease,and most of which appear in negative form,building compromise,struggle and helpless character images.In adulthood,Caddy’s words are greatly reduced,with single theme,negative judgments and imperative clauses of imploring others,so as to build desperate and degenerate images.