A Narratological And Stylistic Analysis Of Great Expectations

Great Expectations has been a prevailing literary canon in English literature. It has become the favorite of both old and new readers throughout the world and is also regarded as a piece of treasure worthy of study and research of people specializing in literature.Dickens, the author of the book, exhibits superb skills in narratology and stylistics, especially the use of dual narrative point of view and different modes of speech presentation. This paper will endeavor to conduct a comprehensive analysis of the novel from the perspective of both narratology and stylistics.Dickens adopts two different points of view in Great Expectations. One is the narrating"I"and the other is the experiencing"I". In the narration of the first person retrospective point of view, the changes of point of view add up to a number of rhetorical effects.Also in this novel, through the employment of the different modes of speech presentation, the author achieves vivid characterization, accomplishes his desired distance and reveals the theme of ambition and self-improvement.The dual narrative point of view and different modes of speech presentation adopted in Great Expectations help to achieve realism. The skill of narratology and stylistics showed in Great Expectations not only conforms to the conventional way but also poses a challenging manner to it. It is believed that Great Expectations is a transitionary work from traditional realism to modernism of the first half of the 20th century.This thesis consists of six parts. The introduction gives a very brief introduction to Dickens and his Great Expectations and also summarizes the situation of current studies on this novel. Also in this part, the central argument and the methodology of the thesis are put forward.Chapter One, the study of the combination of narratology and stylistics, is conducted in two aspects, namely point of view and different modes of speech presentation.Chapter Two analyzes Great Expectations from the aspect of point of view. This chapter emphatically analyzes the narrative point of view, the point of view shifting and the rhetoric effects of point of view.Chapter Three mainly analyzes the five different modes of speech presentation used in Great Expectations, namely direct speech, indirect speech, free direct speech, free indirect speech, and narrative report of speech acts.Chapter Four gives a demonstration of the complementation of narratological analysis and stylistic analysis in reading Great Expectations.The last part serves as a conclusion, which reviews the narratology and stylistics study of Great Expectations. Also in this part, the significance and value of my study are highlighted.