Different Media With Similar Contents: A Comparative Narrative Study Of The Novel This Sporting Life And The Adapted Film

A novelist (winner of the 1976 Booker Prize), playwright and poet as well as screenwriter, David Storey published his famous novel This Sporting Life and won the Macmillan Fiction Award in 1960. The novel was also adapted into a powerful film directed by Lindsay Anderson in 1963. Though the film was not a commercial success, it is widely regarded as one of the finest British feature films ever produced.The narrative theory is a centuries-old yet still developing theory, and both the original novel and the adapted film blend some modern narrative elements in them. As a consequence, this paper tries to use the narrative theory to compare the novel with the same-name adapted film.Introduction briefly introduces the novelist and the director and explains the filmic studies in China and in western countries. Then it states the main idea of the whole paper, that is, a comparative narrative study of the novel—This Sporting Life and the adapted film.Chapter One discusses point of view both in the novel and in the same-name film. Point of view contains many various senses, but it is mainly used as the perceptual point of view in this paper. As for point of view in the novel, according to Genette's idea, the directness of the internal focalization, the effect of "experiencing self and the scatter of zero focalization are studied here and are given the examples in the novel respectively. In terms of point of view in the adapted film, this paper primarily discusses two kinds of "camera-eye" shooting—subjective shots and objective shots. They can represent two different relations between what the camera shows and what the characters are presumed to be seeing. Besides, auricularization (audio point of view) is presented as an audio way to refer to point of view in the film.Chapter Two demonstrates different plots in the novel and in the film. Plot is the narrative process both in the novel and in the film. In this part, this paper talks about three points: different structures of two media, simplification of the plots and absence of some characters in the film. Structure refers to the general design of different plots. Simplification of plots and absence of some characters in the film are inevitable because of the time limit in the film. Through analyzing these similarities and discrepancies, different purpose and intention of the novelist and the director can be fully disclosed.Chapter Three explores the time factors in the novel and in the film. The general terms about time are studied, and they are order, duration and frequency. Large parts of stream of consciousness in the novel and flashbacks in the film are picked out to indicate the "anachronous" sequence. In duration part, its five varieties: pause, scene, summary, ellipsis and stretch are given examples respectively. They are pause, scene, summary, ellipsis and stretch. Moreover, apropos of frequency, anaphoric narrative and iterative narrative are discussed with many examples.Chapter Four examines the narrative languages in the novel and in the film. Four aspects about different language in two media are studied: the film has the identification between the signifier and the signified but the novel does not have such identification; the novel is filled with figures of speech but the film can not manifest these implied things effectively; the novel's narrative language has only the single track—words but the filmic language is a chorus of images, sound and captions; the novelistic language is comparatively close and fogeyish but the filmic language is forever developing with the fast-changing technology.Through analyzing differences on point of view, plot, time and narrative language, this paper discloses that the film is superior to the original novel in some aspects such as vividness, directness and easy-understanding. In the meanwhile, the novel does better than the film in other aspects such as displaying the inner world activities of the characters and showing the complicated characters' relationship and various events. However, both the novel and the film—two different media with similar contents—are successful and have different advantages. Therefore, it cannot be decided which one is better. And both of them can vividly manifest the purpose of the novelist and the director and their marvelous narrative techniques.