Narrative Strategies To Reinforce The Ironical Effect:a Study Of Evelyn Waugh’s The Loved One

Evelyn Waugh is a satirist who enjoys the same fame as Aldous Huxley and George Orwell. He is called "the only first-rate comic genius that has appeared in English since Bernard Shaw". Waugh study abroad is both extensive and fruitful, while that in China just starts with a limited research scope and volume.The Loved One is regarded as Waugh’s most successful return to his early satiric art among his later works. It has been highly regarded by critics and popular among the common readers. Waugh combines his narrative strategies in early satiric novels and religious novels to present his irony on themes like death in this novel. The thesis is going to analyze how these narrative strategies reinforce the ironical effect in the novel on the bases of narratological theories on narrator, speech presentation and focalization, and D. C. Muecke’s ironological theory on the three elements of irony.Waugh gives the narrator in The Loved One two identities. He is both a detached observer and a perceptible commentator. His two identities help him narrate a story with two different layers, revealing the inconsistency between appearance and reality. The interplay of these two roles not only weaves another network of irony out of the story in which the reader is the victim, but also makes the whole story both realistic and artificial, which makes the reader doubt the attitude and opinion he has developed earlier during the reading process.Waugh uses irrelevant conversations and self-indulgent monologues to imply ironic criticism which is not presented directly by the narrator. Conversations between characters seem to be relevant, but they lack real communication, and monologues are the extreme form of such lack of communication. These irrelevant conversations and monologues then are proof of British people’s self-centralism and arrogance.The Loved One adopts both external and internal focalizations to portray the characters, thus achieving ironic effect. Exclusive use of external focalization hides the psychology of the target of irony from the reader, causing the reader to wonder whether America is really a country of individualism as it is publicized, and whether Americans are consistent with their appearance and mind. Then, the shift between external and internal focalization completes the whole ironical network of the novel in another way. Waugh uses external focalization to show the reader the narrator’s neutrality or his approval and the harmonious relationship between characters, while internal focalization implies the narrator’s disapproval and characters’fake intimacy. The demonstration of the two opposite layers of one irony directly in front of the reader provides the reader a better opportunity to grasp the writer’s intention.Waugh satirizes the self-centralism and self-assumed superiority of the British people, the hypocrisy, profit-oriented value system and alleged individualism of Americans, and the universal indifference towards death among human beings through his ingenious narrative strategies.This thesis hopes to reveal Waugh’s narrative strategies of The Loved One, which are different from those he adopts in his early satiric novels, and explain how these strategies reinforce the ironical effect of the novel.