The Narrative Techniques In Ruth

Though the literariness of the Bible has already been widely accepted in the academia, yet researches on its literariness, especially on its narrative techniques, are relatively later than its acceptance. The Bible is a product of the patriarchal culture and among the 66 books in it, only two of them are named after females' names, one of which is Ruth. Ruth is a short story and it adopts unique narrative techniques. And this thesis tries to analyse the narrative techniques in Ruth based on Meir Sternberg's biblical narrative theories.This thesis is composed of four chapters. The first chapter makes an analysis of the narrative gaps in Ruth, maintaining that there are gaps concerning the portrayal of the appearances and the character traits of the three main characters, Ruth, Naomi and Boaz, and all these gaps need the readers' filling in their reading processes. The second chapter expounds the narrative perspectives in Ruth. There are various narrative perspectives in this book, such as the author's, the narrator's, the reader's and the characters' perspectives respectively. In addition, there is a unique narrative perspective in Ruth, God's narrative perspective. And there are also shifts among these narrative perspectives. Chapter three studies the three reading positions in Ruth, reader-elevating, character-elevating and evenhanded. This chapter illustrates the different degrees of the readers' and the characters'mastering of certain information with specific examples from this book. There is rhetoric in Ruth besides the three narrative techniques mentioned above, and the most obvious one is repetition. So chapter four mainly examines repetition in Ruth, holding that there are verbatim repetition and repetition with variation in this book. Besides studying the four narrative perspectives in Ruth, this thesis also discusses the hidden ideology embodied in these narrative perspectives. Such a study of the narrative techniques in Ruth might provide a new way for biblical narrative researches at home.