On Paper-writing Narrative Mode Of The Romantic Movement

As a young and prolific British writer, Alain de Botton, born in December1969in Zurich, Switzerland, has authored fourteen books so far, most of which are best sellers and have been translated into twenty languages. His works are like dissections of particular aspects of the human lives. Alain de Botton has dedicated himself to producing philosophical treatises on such diverse subjects as love, travel, architecture, philosophy, art, work and news.Based on similar love story, de Botton successfully produces his three early love fictions from different perspectives by employing special writing techniques. Some critics call de Botton’s writing style as de Botton style and paper-writing style, since his love fiction is "part novel, part philosophical treatise on the nature of love". Most foreign and domestic researches on Alain de Botton and The Romantic Movement are book reviews and interviews. There is still no comprehensive academic research on analyzing this fiction’s paper-writing style.Gerard Genette promotes the term "focalization" to identify "who speak" and "who see", in which the former is narrative voice and the latter is narrative point of view, and classifies focalization into zero focalization, internal focalization and external focalization. Professor Shen Dan further improves the theory by classifying it into zero focalization, internal focalization, third-person external focalization and first-person external focalization. Xu Dai refers to the theory of focalization and classifies narrative mode into three categories in Fiction Narratology (2010:209-241):zero focalization/nonfocalization mode, internal focalization mode and external focalization mode. This thesis aims to reveal the characteristics of paper-writing narrative mode as well as the causes for the formation of paper-writing narrative mode and its significance by analyzing the paper-writing narrative mode of de Botton’s love fiction The Romantic Movement based on Genette’s theory of focalization as well as other narrative theories.This paper analyzes the paper-writing narrative mode of this fiction from two aspects: the narrative features of The Romantic Movement and three ways of paper-writing narrative showed in this fiction. Through analysis, the thesis concludes that the structure of The Romantic Movement is a closed structure based on open structure, which means as a whole the structure is closed while the internal narrative structure is open. The Romantic Movement adopts the third-person omniscient point of view and the narrator is a third-person omniscient narrator. Apart from being a third-person omniscient narrator, the narrator of his fiction can also be considered as an authorial narrator, a heterodiegetic narrator and an intrusive narrator from different classification of narrators.In terms of paper-writing narrative, de Botton employs thirty-six illustrations that often appear in academic study in this fiction including tables, diagrams, conversational trees, pictures and maps, which can arouse readers’interest and help readers understand the author’s idea easily and vividly. The application of large quantities of classic western literary quotations also contributes to de Botton’s philosophical analysis and thoughts on the nature of love. Besides the two ways above, the method of analytic hierarchy process makes a great contribution to the paper-writing narrative of this fiction as well. The author first presents a life fragment in Alice’s life, then puts forward the point or argument of each part, and finally proves his argument by analyzing carefully and hierarchically the behavior and psychology of the protagonists.This thesis attributes the causes for the formation of paper-writing narrative mode to two aspects:major trends in fiction writing in the20th century and de Botton’s living background and his ideas in literary creation. Paper-writing narrative mode is on one hand influenced by modernism and some experimental writers, and on the other hand is the result of de Botton’s living background and his own idea in literary creation which includes his two writing principles as writing books helpful to human beings and at the same time writing in a plain way so that readers can understand easily. This thesis concludes three significance of this new style narrative mode. Paper-writing narrative mode first develops modern experimental fiction by adding new elements to it such as application of large amounts of illustrations, quotations from various classic works and the special analysis. This kind of narrative mode also makes the boundary between fiction writing and academic writing close. And finally, paper-writing narrative mode leads a new direction in fiction writing, which can also be seen as a new branch in fiction creation.