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Narrative Strategies and Narrative Effects

Author: XuXu
Tutor: DongHongChuan
School: Chongqing Normal University
Course: English Language and Literature
Keywords: Allan Poe short stories narrative strategies first person narrator effect
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Type: Master's thesis
Year: 2008
Downloads: 471
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Abstract

Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849) was an important American poet, short story writer and critic in the 19th century. He suffered a lot of misfortunes all along his lifetime, and his literary style is unique and off the mainstream. During the 40 years of his lifetime, he composed a large number of original works. He is an expert in characterization and very proficient in the description of psychological abnormality. His stories are usually connected with the supernatural events which are shrouded in a weird and bleak atmosphere. Further more, he is now recognized as the forerunner of the detective stories due to his way of ratiocination. And he has fully developed an original and self-sufficient aesthetic poetics which centers on his core“unity of effect”theory. Both in Allan Poe’s composition of poems and short stories, the emphasis is always laid on the preconceived effect, and the form of the unity.The emphasis of this thesis is put on the study on Allan Poe’s short stories. Based on both the French narratologist Gerard Genette’s narrative theory and the discussion about the classification of narrative text in Rimmon-Kenan’s Narrative Fiction, the thesis is intended to probe into Allan Poe’s narrative strategies and narrative effects. This thesis respectively elaborates on the narrative strategies and narrative effects of Allan Poe’s short stories from three aspects. The constant adoption of the first-person focalization in Allan Poe’s short stories is our first concern. It first discusses the effect of absurdity created by the transgression of focalization, and this echoes well with the“originality”which Allan Poe emphasizes in composition. Then, this thesis highlights the sharp contrast between the sense of reality brought about by the adoption of first-person narrative and the fantasies and irrationality in Allan Poe’s short stories, which exerts great impact on the reader’s feelings and emotion. Third, from the perspective of the unreliability of the first-person narrator, the thesis elaborates on the subtext in Allan Poe’s short stories.Our second main concern about Allan Poe’s short stories is the discrepancy between story-time and text-time. Our thesis exemplifies specifically in the three aspects of duration, frequency and order in Allen Poe’s short stories and accordingly further explains the relevant effects.The third major focus of our thesis is on the characterization in Allan Poe’s short stories. Based on Rimmon-Kenan’s classification of the textual indicators of character, the thesis first explains the direct definition and indirect presentation of Poe’s characters, and the latter one is laid on more emphasis. Further more, the thesis resorts to Rimmon-Kenan’s theory of analogous names to understand the effects of the characters’names in Allen Poe’s short stories. Although analogy is not a separate type of character-indicator, yet it can be an effective reinforcement of characterization.With the analysis of Allan Poe’s short stories, this thesis has intensified and broadened the research on his narrative strategies which are in exquisite arrangement, and they are always consistent with Poe’s sole purpose to induce the“preconceived effect”.

Narrative Strategies and Narrative Effects

Abstract

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