| The Golden Notebook is the masterpiece of the Nobel Prize winner Doris Lessing. This novel adopts an experimental narrative structure to convey the theme, and uses a lot of rhetoric devices to reveal the world in the Cold War. This novel consists of novel titled Free Women and the four notebooks of Anna Wulf who is the heroine in Free Woman. In The Golden Notebook, there are lots of Lessing's attitudes and opinions on the society, politics, feminism and racialism. Although many researches have involved these themes, few of them noticed that Lessing conveys the real theme, breakdown and chaos by multiple themes and the fragmentary structure. Thus, in this paper, the narrative stylistic approaches will be applied to study the narrative techniques and linguistic features.In this thesis, the advantages and limitations of different narrative forms are introduced. The narrative discourses of different narrative forms are characterized by stylistic features. In this paper, style is defined as"choice". Therefore, the different narrative forms are realized by also the author's choices of language. According to this, the features and effects of 1st person narration, and omniscient narration in The Golden Notebook will be analyzed, as well as how the themes are presented by the interweaving of these two narrative forms will be discussed. Next, how Lessing uses conversation to portray the different characters and applies the vivid rhetoric devices excellently to reflect the social phenomenon and the mind of heroine will be focused on.In conclusion, through the narration, we can see that, by applying narrative stylistic approaches to analyze The Golden Notebook can learn the main characters of this book on the whole. The different choices of expressing way realize the shifting of different narrative forms. And this kind of shifting breaks up the traditional narrative structure to reflect a disordered society and the heroine's chaotic spiritual world. Plenty of conversations and rhetoric devices portray different characters and a dark world during that turbulent time. |
