A Comparative Study Of Narrative Styles In Li Yu's Short Stories And Boccace's Décaméron

The main purpose of this dissertation is to compare the narrative styles in Li Yu's short stories and Boccace's Décaméron in three aspects.First, the author focuses on the comparison of structure in the two works. To achieve a whole and systematic picture of the structural characteristics of the two woks, the present discussion is not confined to the narrative structure in the strict narratological sense. To begin with, the analysis on the macrostructure reveals: there is a symmetrical structure in Liyu's Silence Play and an iconic structure of garden in his Twelve Pavilions, while Boccace's Décaméron embodies a parallel structure in its 100 stories. The author goes on to compare the textual structure of the two works. Generally speaking, a short story of Li Yu consists of a preliminary poem, an introduction, a main body and a concluding poem; but a story in Décaméron is composed of a title exposition, an introduction, a main story and an end in poetic form. The author proceeds to the comparison of the narrative structure in the two works. It is found out that there is a striking similarity in narrative structure between the two, the narrative mode is to be generalized as"the initial balance→the interference of external Force 1→the loss of balance→the interference of external Force 2→the new balance".Second, the author compares the types of narrator and the narrative perspectives in the two works. This chapter is divided in to parts: 1) the types of narrator and 2) the narrative perspectives. The first part of this chapter demonstrates: on the one hand, the narrators in Li Yu's short stories have been strongly influenced by the self-image of the author though they still take traces of the traditional"storyteller", and the narrative function of this feature is also analyzed in this part; on the other, there exist in Décaméron four levels of narratives which corresponds with four narrators with different functions. The second part shows: there is"partial"perspective in both works though they employ the traditional omniscient perspective. This part also makes an analysis on the features of flowing perspective in Li Yu's short stories.