Who Is Sarah?

John Fowles, honored by Malcolm Bradbury as "the most talented and serious novelist of UK after World War II ", is a contemporary English fiction writer, with his works famous for profound thought and novel styles. His masterpiece, The French Lieutenant’s Woman, is considered as one of the milestones in the history of UK’s postmodernist novels.Uncertainty is an important characteristic of post-modernism. Ihab Hassan, a renowned postmodernism theorist of the United States, holds the view that uncertainty constitutes our world, which has been the major artistic feature of a fair amount of post-modernism novels. The French Lieutenant’s Woman is a case in point. Therefore, uncertainty is a key to thorough understanding of the novel. Based on the knowledge of the narratology, existentialism, reader criticism and through the method of biographical criticism, cultural criticism as well as text analysis, this thesis takes its text features as the basic point, analyzes its narration way, and then explores the essential cause of the uncertainty, with the aim to obtain a deep and overall understanding of uncertainty about this novel.Introduction part outlines the domestic and foreign research on the life and works of John Fowles. It also defines the key word "uncertainty" that will be analyzed in this thesis.The main body of the thesis is divided into3chapters as follows.Chapter I is designed to analyze the text features of The French Lieutenant’s Woman, discussing the performance of aesthetics characteristic on the basis of the uncertainty of the character, plot and fiction types.Chapter Ⅱ analyzes its narration way. The uncertainty of The French Lieutenant’s Woman springs directly from the postmodernist narrative techniques used by the author, including the narrative perspective, intertextuality and meta-fiction, which are taken as a particular narrative mode.Chapter III illustrates the relationship between the novel and the historical context. The uncertainty of The French Lieutenant’s Woman roots in the context of times, and at the same time, it embodies the influence of the philosophy of existentialism on John Fowles and his positive response. Besides, it is closely related to John Fowles’reader-awareness.Based on the analysis above, conclusion part points out the spiritual essence of the uncertainty—the writer’s respect to freedom.