The Narrative Art Of Mrs. Dalloway

Virginia Woolf is one of the most famous British writers in British literature history. Mrs. Dalloway is one of her classic works, and it is also the successful case for her trying of new writing techniques. The novel illustrates a whole day activity of Mrs. Dalloway, a housewife of a British Member of Parliament. The novel focuses on her party, and at the same time the author Virginia Woolf penetrates all sorts of people of English society, while readers can fully appreciate the stream of consciousness simultaneously. The literary circles have paid great attention to it just after the publication of the novel with huge interest in the new writing techniques.The main purpose of this thesis is to try to analyze the narrative characteristics with some relevant theories of narratology from both vertical and horizontal dimensions, which are narrative time and narrative focalization, and the language mode of the novel. It surely needs super narrative techniques for the author to write so many complicated experiences of so many people within just one day, to be specific, just more than ten hours. In the first place, it is from the vertical dimension, i.e., narrative time to analyze the narrative art of the novel. The dealing with time is very important in novels’ writing. The purpose of discrepancy of narrative time and story time is for the writer to make the characters’experiences more to the readers full with much analepsis and prolepsis; at the same time, scene, as the main duration in the novel, can sufficiently demonstrate the characters’inner world. In the second place, it is from the horizontal dimension, which is narrative focalization. Different from the former generally used style of primarily zero focalization, it is mainly internal focalization, with zero focalization at the key turns, thus both the author and readers can go deep into the inner part of the characters and have resonance. Therefore, Woolf gets the general arrangement of the novel by the vertical and horizontal parts. Of course, what is closely connected with focalization is free indirect speech, a kind of narrative language transition and so it is the last part of this thesis. The application of free indirect speech can make readers sense immediately what the character thinks, and show the colorful inner world of the characters.Finally, although the novel seems loosely connected in both structure and characters, Virginia Woolf makes bold innovation in writing techniques, and all of these make the novel even more charming.