Narrative Strategies Of Susan Sontag's Volcano Lover

This thesis reads The Volcano Lover from the perspective of narratology. Mainly rooted in the theory of Genette's Narrative Discourse and other related documents, the thesis attempts to explore and analyze the narrative strategies of this novel, in the hope of revealing Susan Sontag's unique narrative style and bold performance in narrative writing.Excluding introduction and conclusion, this thesis consists of fives chapters. Each chapter starts with its corresponding definitions, and then detailed analysis of this novel and brief conclusion.The introduction mainly includes a brief introduction to Susan Sontag and her third novel The Volcano Lover, then the literature review and theoretical sources of the thesis, as well as the reasons why the present author chooses it as the research object. The first chapter starts from narrative order, with the focus on analepsis, prolepsis and achrony. It is evident that, with the help of this narrative skill, the writer freely shuttles through history and reality, and condenses the distant past into the present text, leaving readers the charming memory.The second chapter has the most detailed discussions, dealing with narrative duration. There are four types of narrative duration: ellipsis, summary, scene and pause. Employing the four movements, Sontag converts history into scenes, and changes the historical memory into the flowing of the scenes. On the brand-new spiritual level, readers acquire a new sensation over history covered with dust.The third chapter tries to analyze narrative frequency. Combining various definitions of different types of frequencies with the text itself, this chapter points out how the three types, singulative narrative, repeating narrative and iterative narrative, are employed in this novel to foil the characters'destiny and push forward the development of the narrative.The fourth chapter begins with narrative mood, focusing on distance and perspective. It discusses how the writer adjusts narrative distances to reveal the different relationship between the narrator and narrative objects. Moreover, with the focalizations shifting back and forth, readers involuntarily go deep into the narrative situations set by the writer, finding themselves in the characters'love entanglement and the historical true vortex.The last chapter reveals the functions narrative voice plays in this novel. The switch of narrative instances, the progression of narrative levels, and the transition of persons lead readers from historical macro-world into individual micro-world, and hence strengthen the three-dimensional sense and the expressive force of the novel.Based upon the previous analysis, it is concluded that The Volcano Lover is a classical works with external historical form perfectly combined with internal spiritual level. It is the employment of these unique and ingenious narrative strategies that plays an irreplaceable part in not only characterizing the vivid characters, but also, more importantly, activating history with reality and re-examining reality with history, aimed at endowing dust-laden history with a new sensibility. By focusing on the narrative discourse of The Volcano Lover, this thesis makes an attempt at analyzing its artistic effects exerted by narrative strategies, in the hope that it will be of great help in the application and exploration of narratology.