Go Afar, Think Apart

Anne Tyler (1941- ) is a famous contemporary American woman writer. Since 1960s she has published 15 novels, over fifty short stories and numerous book reviews. Like other southern writers, she chooses family as the writing subject in her works, depicting unknown people's lives, especially the conflicts between individual and family, individual and society. Anne Tyler is famous for her plain prose style, rich characterization, and deep insight in family relationships. In her novels, Tyler has created vivid, fresh images one after another, winning popularity both among common readers and in critical circles. Many of her novels have won national awards. The novel discussed in this thesis Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant is her ninth, also landmark one. It not only wins the Faulkner Award, but also a nomination for a Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. Besides, it has gained acknowledgement from critics and readers, becoming the best seller for the first time in Tyler's literary career. Ever since then, Anne Tyler has assured her position as a prominent woman writer.Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant is a story about three generations' lives' of the Tulls from the end of 1930s to the beginning of 1980s in Baltimore, a Southern town in the United States of America. It begins from Pearl Tull, the first generation of this family on her deathbed, reminiscing about her poignant life, especially her hard time in raising her three children after the abandonment by her husband. Then it starts to tell three children's growing up experiences, mixed with contradiction between brothers, the daughter's pitiful thrice marriages, the conflict and estrangement between mother and sons, mother and daughter, and also children's strong urge and disappointment for a happy family. The novel ends with the death of Pearl Tull. Tyler has discussed the relationship between family and individual in many of her works, but it is in this one that she has reached a new stage, giving a comprehensive elaboration about different people's attitude towards home.Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant is a typical exemplification of Tyler's family novels. Many foreign scholars and critics have published comments and essays on it. However, few Chinese scholars pay attention to it. Actually, in China until now, there is not a single monograph on the study of this American woman writer. Besides, most materials about the novel focus on the explanation of its content. Although there are some fragmentary studies about its writing form and style, regretfully, there is not a systematic one in this aspect. Thus, the purpose of this thesis is to study how the writer accomplishes her themes and characterization by applying narrative techniques. According to close textual reading, it is a comprehensive narrative reading and anatomy about this novel, which will help readers obtain a better understanding about this southern woman writer's writing style and theme.This thesis mainly consists of five chapters.Chapter one is a brief introduction about the author, the novel, a literature review and theoretical framework. The focus of the theoretical part is a brief introduction of narrative theories that are applied in this thesis.Chapter two is a discussion about the narrative perspective in this novel. It is about how Tyler uses modern narrative perspective: the third person limited omniscience and multiple points of view to present Pearl, Cody, Ezra and Jenny's complex, multifaceted traits and inner world clearly through textual reading on each chapter's special perspective. The second part is to analyze the alienated, estranged relationships between focal characters and other characters, in the hope of helping readers to gain a better understanding about these characters and the subtle relationships among them.In chapter three, according to Genette's concept of order, duration and frequency in Narrative Discourse, the author of this thesis makes an analysis of the complicated narrative time mode and their function, giving a full elaboration about the style of narrative time. It firstly analyses about the rearranged narrative events to exemplify the difference between story time and discourse time. The normal story time order is disrupted, creating new superficial dislocated discourse time, which embodies variability and uniqueness style. In duration part, the attention is focused on the analysis of scene, a rather prominent characteristic in the text. There is also a description about other concepts of duration, such as summary, pause, slow-down, ellipsis used in the text. This variable narrative mode forms an overall smooth narrative rhythm intermingled with ease and tension time and time. In the light of Genette's concept of "frequency", there is an analysis of singulative, repetitive and iterative frequency. There is a detailed analysis about the arrow event in which pearl is hurt. Different narrations from the angle of Pearl, Cody, Ezra and Beck are presented to show its effect and shadow. Besides, seven unfinished dinners at the Homesick Restaurant are depicted to disclose conflicts among characters and the alienation among them in the whole text.Chapter four is a macro analysis of the novel's complex narrative time structure and its meanings on the basis of David Danow's theory about three aspects in the model of narrative time: linearity, memory and epiphany. This multileveled narrative time also reflects the multifaceted traits of each character and their complicated relationships. Besides, each character lives in the shadow of the past, especially for Pearl, Cody, Ezra and Jenny. Memory fragments appear in their mind time and again, predicting their hearts lingering on the edge between the past and the present. Finally each one gets relieved in the epiphany, which is a connection point among the past, present and the future.The last chapter is a conclusion about this thesis and some expectation about the study of this novel and Anne Tyler's other novels.