The Study On The Deep Narrative Structure Of The Decameron

The Decameron, which has blazed a new path in western novel history, has been enjoying the honor of the founding work, with its epoch-making significance ideologically and artistically, thus making it worthy of our study. Generally, as for the researches domestic and abroad on it, it can be roughly divided into two categories: semantic and syntactic criticism. Western criticism of it from 14th to the middle of 20th century and domestic research didn't surpass the former-semantic criticism, focusing on the relationship of the work and outside world, namely discussing the historical and societal significance from the angle of sociology. Of course, such criticism has contributed a lot in digging out the signified meaning of the great work. However it should be pointed that there exist some deficiency, for instance, it only answered such questions as to what has been written in the work not to how it has been written. Strictly speaking, such a critic mode can't be called a professional criticism only by the specialties. Therefore, from the middle and late 20th century, structuralists put forwards a more intrinsic, objective and specialized criticism mode-syntactic criticism, which mainly center the relationship among the components of a work, namely offering solutions of how to write and how to construct. Such a criticism showed us a new criticism phase of the Decameron -its structural phase; however its limitations lie in focusing attention on its superficial structure without probing into its deep structures, for example, how a work was generally constructed.Based on the above analyses, the dissertation mainly covers the following parts: first of all is to expound the Deep Structure Theory. The deep structure of literature is directly related to our ideological and language structure, to which Saussure has ever given an incisive exposition. Different morphemes build up according to two ways: syntagmatic relations and associative relations, which Jacobson further developed into metaphor and metonymy respectively. That's to say, people organize morphemes or the structure of their ideological language by means of homogeneous congregation and heterogeneous collage.The next part is to put more emphasis on elaborating the ways by which the Decameron build up its deep structures. Based on the retrace of various literary narrative ways of ancient Greek and the Medieval age, the dissertation holds that every story in the Decameron inherited the structure of Homeric epic, chronologicallyorganizing events and constructing works on a person's experience in a certain period, namely syntagmatic relations or metonymy. However, with its one hundred stories in ten days or ten stories a day, its general structure inherited the stereoscopic structure of the Medieval narrative literary, which had Dante's the Divine Comedy as a representative, in other words, the organization of materials in the light of the nature of different events. Moreover, its prelude, epilogue, libretto and the interlude of the fourth day story adopted homogeneous discussion and overlapping images. In one word, the Decameron harmoniously connected metonymy of ancient times and metaphoric structure of the Medieval ages, here ancient Greek and Hebrew narrative literary modes of long standing first found a perfect integration, bequeathing us a great pioneering work of modern narrative literary.