A Study Of The Narrative Features In Man In The Dark

Paul Auster is a contemporary American writer whose literary works include eighteen novels, three memoirs, a volume of selected poems, four screenplays and a large number of critic essays. He has earned a worldwide reputation as an excellent writer by publishing his masterpiece, New York Trilogy. Paul Auster has been widely recognized as a postmodern writer while he once claimed that he was a realistic writer. One of the reasons for this contradiction is that his fictional world is often governed by absurdity and chance. They are usually seen as the symbols of post-modernity, but they are just the nature of life in his mind.Man in the Dark, published in 2008, has won high praise from the critics. Though some parts of this novel reflect the author’s insistence of his unique narrative technique, it is far from similar to Paul Auster’s other books. This thesis analyzes its narrative features on the basis of the related theory of narratology in order to get a better understanding of the author and the novel.There are three parts chiefly: the introduction, the main body and the conclusion. Part one includes brief introductions to both the author and the novel, together with the literature review. The main body is divided into three chapters. Chapter One depicts the feature of the narrator and the point of view in this novel. There are several narrators in this novel. The change of the narrators inexorably leads to the change of the point of view, so one section studies how the points of view shift. Chapter Two decodes the narrative strategies. There are three sections. The first is the metafictional strategy which is a commonly used narrative strategy by Paul Auster and is also one of the most important features in this novel. Another narrative strategy is the non-liner narrative, because the stories in the novel do not follow the chronological order. The last one is the embedded structure. Chapter Three analyzes the literary effects achieved by Auster’s narrative devices. One of them is the alternative histories and the other one is a new type of anti-war fiction. The conclusion part shows Paul Auster’s writing idea and his understanding of life and literature.