The Narrative Art Of Kawabata Yasunari’s Palm-of-the-hand Novel

Kawabata Yasunari (1899—1972) is a famous novelist and representative of the New Sensation School in Japan,who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1968.His works combined the aesthetic style of Japanese literature with western modernist writing techniques skillfully to express people’s inside sorrow and pain,thus exhibiting strong lyric features.Kawabata literature is not only occupies an important position in Japanese Literature but also shows unique value in World Literature.This thesis is mainly composed of three sections:the introduction,the text and the epilogue.The main text is divided into four chapters.The Introduction of this thesis shows a brief presentation and the research situation in and out about Kawabata and his palm-of-the-hand novels,the problems which the thesis mainly studied,the significance of the subject,the research techniques and the meaning of the palm-of-the-hand novels.The thesis figures out there is few research achievements about Kawabata’s palm-of-the-hand novels especially the analysis of its narrative art although the overall study of Kawabata literature has been comprehensive and in-depth.So this thesis tries to investigates Kawabata’s unique narrative style and the narrative art features in his palm-of-the-hand novels with narrative theory,specifically from narrative perspective,narrative structure,narrative time and narrative language,in order to understand the unique value of Kawabata’s early works.Chapter 1 mainly analyzes the transferability of the narrative perspective in Kawabata’s palm-of-the-hand novels.These works mainly adopted the non-focused perspective and the internal-focused perspective.Firstly,the non-focused perspective plays a role in observing and reflecting people’s instantaneous state of mind,exposing the narrator’s attitudes and his/her narration. Secondly,the works show the author’s thoughts about love、marriage and war by the mutual survey of gender internal-focused perspective.The transferability of narrative perspectives is revealed in two ways.On one hand,the narrator’s perspective transferred into figure’s perspective by using the direct speech and changing the narrative person,results in limiting to narrator’s perspective and the desalination of story’s reality.On the other hand,the transforms among the figures’ perspective helps to convey the story agilely.Chapter 2 mainly analyzes the open structure of Kawabata’s palm-of-the-hand novels.On one hand,the works add other narrative forms like diary、 fiction and letters,as well as dreams and delusions to surface narrative,creating a double-flat narrative structure of content.On the other hand,the unclear plot,the lack of logic,the unclear results of stories,all making an incomplete narrative structure as well as increasing the obscurity and polysemy of the works.Chapter 3 mainly analyzes the non-liner narrative time of Kawabata’s palm-of-the-hand novels,which behaves in three aspects:the combination of reverse time sequence and non-sequential time cuts the traditional linear narrative;the writing techniques such as equal-narrative and omit result in a changeable narrative rhythm;the unique narrative space weakens the linear metric time.Chapter 4 mainly analyzes the poetic narrative language of Kawabata’s palm-of-the-hand novels,which mainly displays in three aspects:lyrical,musical and philosophical.To put it specifically,the works read lyrical by using figure’s words to express feelings and showing bright, dejected and sentimental flavors; the musicality of the words displays in the rhythmical image which enhanced by the onomatopoetic word and regular short sentences,the rhythm which showed by the parallelism and reiteration,the whirling beauty which exhibited by the circle of the sentences;the philosophy of the words is expressed not only by the adoption of meditative stories and sentences but also the application of symbolism and the metaphor.The Conclusion mainly analyzes the modernity of the narrative features in Kawabata’s palm-of-the-hand novels,which can be recognized in four ways.Firstly,the works adopt the creative methods of the New Sensation School by using some novel words and symbolism,focusing on people’s instantaneous state of mind.Secondly,the works adopted the meta-fictive narration by exposing the creating stages and the creative skills by the narrator in order to strengthening the authority of the writer as well as shortening the distance between the reader and the writer.Thirdly,the works show introversive personality by exposing people’s inside psychology,especially the mentality of people in love.Lastly,the works also expand the scope and meaning of literature by adding something unrealistic and surrealistic.