Study On Realistic And Postmodernist Elements In Martin Amis's Night Train

As one of the relatively late novels by Martin Amis, Night Train is probably new to not a small portion of readers, especially in China. Written in 1997, it tells the process of a woman detective Mike Hoolihan's investigating a mysterious case in which a young woman named Jennifer Rockwell commits suicide in her bedroom. After physical autopsy, Mike's interrogation of Faulkner (Jennifer's lover), and her informal conversation with Jennifer's physician, her department head, and her former roommate, the novel concludes itself without giving the reader a definite and satisfactory answer to Jennifer's motive to take her own life. Martin is well known for his―postmodernist trickeries‖, which means that he employs a large number of non-traditional artistic techniques in his works. However, Night Train remains realistic to some degree both in form and substance. This thesis intends to make a detailed analysis of this novel's narrative features, both realistic and postmodernist, from the perspective of classical narrative; and also of its thematic concern, which is mostly postmodernist, by close reading and reader-response criticism.This thesis consists of three sections, the introduction, the body, and the conclusion. The first section presents such messages as the brief introduction of the author Martin Amis and Night Train, the literature review on Martin's works, especially Night Train, the theories applied, and of the purpose and significance of this thesis. The body composes three chapters. Chapter One centers upon the analysis of double voice, one from the first-person narrator and the other the author, in the diegetic discourse to describe Night Train's realistic and postmodernist narrative features. Chapter Two revolves around the issue of narrative time in the whole text. The lengthy discussion of such realistic narrative techniques as narrative order, duration, and frequency in relation to the text also serves the purpose of explaining how these realistic narrative techniques, particularly frequency, are instrumental to the conveying of postmodernist messages—life crisis and highly-mediated identity. The last chapter directs attention to the realism and postmodernism in Night Train based upon close reading and reader-response criticism. Finally, the thesis concludes itself with summarizing the realistic and postmodernist elements adopted by Martin Amis to achieve his desired effects.