On Narrative Techniques In A Passage To India

Edward Morgan Forster, a well-known British novelist, literary theorist and essayist of the 20^th century, combines the traditional with the modern in his works. His masterpiece A Passage to India, with its profound implications and new writing methods, presents his view of liberal humanism and flexible narrative techniques. Thus, this novel can serve as a good example in studying Forster's art and techniques of fiction.This dissertation firstly gives a brief introduction to Forster's life and his works, together with his view of liberal humanism and theory of the novel. Besides, this part summarizes the previous studies on A Passage to India.Chapter II is devoted to analyzing the use of focalization in A Passage to India. Forster employs this technique to achieve psychological realism in this novel. He still uses zero focalization (the traditional omniscient narration), but the narrator's voice moves to meditative and speculative, and his comments become covert and impersonal. In order to show the character's interior life, Forster adopts internal focalization to enable the reader to probe into the character's inner feelings, thoughts, memories, etc. As the focalization shifts from one character to another, the different characters' consciousness appears before the reader. Therefore, through multiple internal focalization, Forster allows the reader to have a more complete view of the characters and events, and to obtain "multi-personal subjectivity".Chapter III reveals that the employment of free indirect discourse enables Forster to achieve both psychological realism and irony in A Passage to India. Free indirect discourse "mixes" the narrator's and the character's two voices and two viewpoints. And it not only shows the character's subjectivity but also retains the narrator's humorous and ironic tone. Meanwhile, the narration of the novel becomes easy and smooth.In the concluding chapter, the author of this thesis draws the conclusion that Forster achieves psychological realism and irony through the employment of focalization and free indirect discourse in A Passage to India. As a novelist in the period of transition from realist literature to modernist literature, Forster takes in the tradition and innovation, and promotes the development of modernist fiction.