Life Of Pai:Spatial Narration In Novel And Movie

Since the1990s, narratology extended its research scope,which makes movie and space become the new research objects. The research of spatial narration is on the rise as well. Spatial narration means arranging the structure with space, promoting the process with space. The space includes not only place and scene of the story, people’s action and mentality, the space of the text or screen, but also the imagination of narratees. The thesis tries to explore how they narrate with space and show their own characteristics through analyzing both novel and movie of Life of Pi.The exordium is a brief introduction of narratology, the summary about research status of Life of Pi, and the purposes of the writing. The first part clears the concepts of space and spatial narration, and analyzes the novel and movie of Life of Pi from the overall view. The second part uses two perspectives--narrator and narratee to discuss the characteristics of Pi in space, and imagination of reader and audience respectively. The characteristics of Pi comes from his performance in different spaces. The special religion also adds some mystery. Pai is the main narrator of the story, the writer and accident investigator in the story are the narratees, different narrative motion affected narratee to receive information. Another probes several special space about the narrative feature of narratee. The third part discusses the similarities and differences between novel and movie of Life of Pi with spatial narration, and holds the view that movie have more advantages on performance space because space always exists in the movie. What’s more, the movie uses the techniques of montage and the dual narration.