Multiplicity In The French Lieutenant's Woman

John Fowles makes his mark as a novelist in the world of the twentieth century, whose masterpiece The French Lieutenant's Woman has imposed a widespread and far-reaching impact on the world literary circle for its successful exploration of the narrative arts. On the basis of criticizing Victorian moral hypocrisy and publicizing the existentialism freedom, the novel adopts an attitude of succeeding to and going beyond the traditional literature to construct its unique and colorful narrative arts with multiple narrative viewpoints and structures.For the point of the postmodernist multiplicity feature, my thesis attempts to approach the novel from the aspects of the narrative perspective, the narrative structure and the theme so as to study its narrative arts.The thesis is divided into five parts.Introduction introduces the background of the novel writing, the brief introduction of Fowles and various critical views towards the novel and presents the objectives and significance of the thesis.Chapter One analyzes multiple points of view. The novel introduces simultaneously the traditional omniscient and intrusive point of view, the modern limited one and the postmodernist self-conscious one. That is, the whole story is not constructed in one single viewpoint, but multiple ones, which is the very evidence that Fowles seeks to succeed to and surpass the traditional literature. That is one aspect of the multiplicity feature of the postmodernist in the novel.Chapter Two discusses multiple narrative structures. Fowles follows the traditional unified narrative structure with a complete linear disposition in the surface structure. But in the deep narrative structure there appear three breaks, which interrupt the unity, and form the discontinued narrative structure with the postmodernist nature. Narrative collages are also much concerned. including one or two epigraphs at the beginning of each chapter giving the implications to the plots, and associated comments aroused by historical facts, social research reports, statistics, footnotes, etc. That is the third level of the narrative structure. Such multiple narrative structures expand narrative space in a remarkable way, and enhance the scope of the novel covering the life and the depth of the novel penetrating the life, break single-dimension linear narrative space of the traditional novels which is dominated by the system of cause and effect based on mimetic reality and lead to the construction of multi-dimensional open narrative structure.Chapter Three deals with multiplicity in the freedom themes. The frequent changing of the point of view and the construction of multi-dimensional open narrative structure result in the formation of changeable narrative style, which helps Fowles for the expression of multiple themes: narrative freedom- a narrator who always claims to be the creator of the novel's characters and who makes cameo appearances in the narrative,the social freedom, or the theme of British critical realism- how to attain freedom in the repressed Victorian Age, and the existentialism freedom - postmodernist themes.Conclusion briefly summarizes the unique and colorful narrative style of the novel on the fusion of tradition and innovation, which not only presents the multiplicity feature of the postmodernist, but also provides an alternative for the development of postwar postmodernist novel.