A Study Of Narrative Strategies In A Curtain Of Green And Other Stories

Eudora Welty (1909-2001) is a famous novelist of America, playing an important role in American contemporary literary circles. Welty was born in Mississippi, and is a representative of American Southern Literature. A Curtain of Green and Other Stories, her first collection of short novels, was published in 1941, which consists of seventeen short stories, such as Lily Daw and the Three Ladies, A Newspaper, and Petrified Man. All these stories are developed under the background of southern towns of America, and characters therein are almost ordinary people. The tone of these stories are either scoffing and ridiculous, describing the philistinism, humor and hypocrisy of life, or gender and euphemistic, showing the sentiment and puzzles of the youth, or serious and miserable, revealing the lack of materials, psychological trauma, and being unable to communicate.The phrase "narrative strategy" is derived from narrative studies and is usually applied in the studies on narrative literary works. In this thesis, the author analyzes A Curtain of Green and Other Stories from aspects of narrative perspectives, characterization and irony.Narrative perspectives include the traditional omniscient perspective, the innovative internal perspective and unreliable special perspective. Through traditional omniscient perspective, the writer attempts to develop an "authoritative intermediary vision", where the narrator observes things like Almighty God, and then selectively describes what he observes to readers. However, the innovative internal perspective employs a first person of "I", to show the inner conflicts and ideas of characters, promoting the plot and controlling the development of narrative advancement with ways of internal monologue, direct speech and free indirect speech. The unreliable special perspective adopts the vision of other unreliable narrators, to make up the functions which cannot be accomplished by omniscient perspective of narrator and internal perspective of leading characters, and increase the dramatic effect and readability of the novel. Among the seventeen stories in A Curtain of Green and Other Stories, there are thirteen stories which employ the traditional omniscient perspective, such as Lily Daw and the Three Ladies, A Newspaper, and Petrified Man, two stories employ the innovative internal perspective, which are Why I Live at The P.O, and A Memory, and the other stories adopt the unreliable special perspective, among which there are The hitch-hikers, Death of a Traveling Salesman, and Old Mr. Marblehall. The massive use of traditional omniscient perspective shows the simple and practical writing style of the writer and the realism of the stories, which may have something to do with the author’s experience of being engaged in photography for many years. In the eleven stories such as Lily Daw and the Three Ladies, Petrified Man, and Key, the writer creates many freak characters, which reveals Welty’s concern about the failure and success of people’s handling with human nature, the contradiction between human’s inner life and the external need, and the conflicts between tradition and modern things in the transition period. In the context of transition period of society, human nature is distorted, where ordinary people struggling in agony, the determined survived while the one with soul deformity went to perdition. All these stories show Welty’s deep insight into the humanity. Among the seventeen stories in A Curtain of Green and Other Stories, there are ten stories where the art of irony is adopted. In Petrified Man, A Newspaper and Lily Daw and Three Ladies, situational stony is adopted, while in the other stories such as Clytie, Key, Old Mr. Marblehall, and A Visit of Charity, deep irony is employed. The writer reveals the inner world of the character and pictures the journey of their inner heart though the art of irony, to highlight the tension among people, and reshape the truth, goodness and beauty in the writer’s eyes.The study on Welty’s novels from the perspective of narrative strategy is a creative and important attempt, which will enrich and deepen the study of Eudora Welty and her works, and dig into the social problems during the transition period. Therefore, the study has unique literary value and social value.