| As the first Canadian authoress received the Nobel Prize in Literature, Alice Munro joins contemporary literary world with its exquisite style. In her works, profound and rich implications hide behind the life of nobodies.Although her stories are short, they have deep meanings that is almost not inferior to novels.In limited narrative space of short story, she tries to depict the birth, aging, illness, and death. What we see is cruel truth of life that is far more real than fiction. To some extent, that is closely related to her ironic narration.The paper is intended to study Alice Munro’s short stories from ironic narration to multiple themes based on the concept of irony as a starting point, combining with the narratology, biography, close-reading and other related theories, eventually to grasp the inclusive artistic features of hers.Chapter 1 explores the relationship between irony and Munro from the concept of irony, Munro’s narrative features, country, family, life experience and so on. It is concluded that the ironic narration is an important feature of Munro’s narrative. This chapter sums up ironic narration plays a vital role in character portraying, fate revelation, and plot arrangement through analyzing Munro’s some representative works by using the method of close-reading, and finally draws a conclusion that it affects the deep themes of Munro’s stories. Chapter 2 discusses multiplicity of themes of Munro’s stories respectively from "multiple fission of female theme", "tow-line’s overlap of disease theme" and "reverse inversion of death theme". Chapter 3 discusses the artistic characteristics of Munro’s stories. There is no certain concept to evaluate her stories. Her writing was inclusive, which deviates from the mainstream literature and contains paradox and a variety of contradictions and opposites. Epilogue part summarizes the whole paper, finally to present research value of this paper. |
