Striding Through Miseries In Storytelling

After the publication of her first novel The Joy Luck Club in 1989, Amy Tanbecame one of the representatives of Asian American writers. The Bonesetter'sDaughter (2001) is Tan's fourth novel. In this novel, she creates a single storyencompassing a lineage of three women. It shuttles in time and space between presentand past, the United State and China. Tan has particular methods to narrate a story andseize the reader's curiosity, and then expresses the main ideas of her work. Based onGerard Genette's theory of narratology, this thesis analyzes the narrating method ofthe novel. It deviates from the popular studies on feminism and post-colonialism andaims to analyze the text of the novel from the perspective of structuralist narratologyand illustrates how the narrating method enhances the theme.The thesis is composed of three parts—introduction, main body and conclusion.Introduction presents the background information of Amy Tan and main plots of thenovel, lists the critical responses, introduces Genette's theory of narratology andconcludes the central argument of the thesis. There are three chapters in the main body.Chapter One analyzes narrators and narrative levels in the narrative about Ruth andLuLing's narrative. It defines the homodiegetic and heterodiegetic narrators atdifferent levels and illustrates the functions of various narrators. Chapter Two focuseson the order and duration in the two narratives. It analyzes the narrating techniques,such as analepses and prolepses, scene, ellipsis and summary, which are applied in thenarratives. Chapter Three studies the focalization and narrative distance in the twonarratives. It analyzes the mood of narrating, including the perspective from which thestory is narrated, and the distance between the narrative text and narrators, and thedistance between the narratives and the author Amy Tan. The part of Conclusionsummarizes the result of the research. Although the techniques Amy Tan applies tonarrate the story accord with the traditional ways of narrating, the application oftraditional methods creates extraordinary effects on conveying and deepening thenovel's themes.