A Study Of Irony In The Narrow Road To The Deep North By Richard Flanagan

Richard Flanagan is the third Australian author who has won the Man Booker Prize.So far,he has already published six novels,including the previous works focusing on Tasmanian colonial "soul history",such as Death of a River Guide,The Sound of One Hand Clapping,Gould’s Book of Fish,and recent works The Unknown Terrorists and Wanting concentrating on social reality.The Narrow Road to the Deep North is Richard Flanagan’s sixth novel,which was finally published in 2013 after his 12 editorials in 12 years,and won the 2014 Man Booker Prize.It successfully won critics’ praise both at home and abroad and has been studied from various perspectives such as post-colonialism,cultural clashes,and the existentialist issues such as the essence of war or humanity.Generally,the related research mainly focuses on the content and theme,still in lack of the study from narrative perspective.Flanagan combined colonial historical writing with his postmodern multicultural awareness in this novel,which was based on the real historical event:the war prisoners’experience(including Flanagan’s father)during the building of Burma railway.The novel differs from other historical and war novels with its unique structure and unconventional binary opposition,with particular attention to individual’s life,vividly reproducing individual’s fate in wartime.Apart from the content,the novel’s unique narrative style and linguistic features also distinguish it from many literary works based on the history of WWII,and are also highly praised by overseas critics.Among them,irony runs through the entire novel,which is also the most important language skill and rhetorical feature.However,the research from the perspective of irony has not been deeply involved about this work by now.Based on the irony theory from D.C.Mick,Wayne Booth,Kierkegaard and others,this thesis analyzes various types of irony presented in this novel,and explores its artistic value.In The Narrow Road to the Deep North Flanagan creates a series of distinctive characters.He not only portrays the flawed hero Dorrigo and the"evil" Japanese officers but also deconstructs the binary creation of characters in traditional war novels.Thus,this thesis will first analyze the irony of main characters’ images from the Australian camp of "justice" and the "evil"images in the Japanese camp,in order to explore the irony used in characterization and highlight the complexity and contradiction of human nature.Secondly,the thesis will explore verbal irony,situational irony and dramatic irony created by unreliable narrative based on the traditional rhetoric irony theories and D.C.Mick’s theory of irony so as to further explore the heterogeneous national culture and social values behind enslavement and oppression.Besides,due to the author’s attention toward individual’s miserable fate during the widespread war,irony can be found in language fragment,plot arrangement,and the whole structure.By adopting irony,Flanagan represents sufferings and agonies vividly,and thus deepens the themes of the novel.In the end,this thesis explores the functions of irony and focuses on the unique aesthetics in order to deepen readers’ understanding of the binary concepts,such as good and evil,history and reality,and other issues like human nature,war and love.Flanagan shows the complexity and contradiction shared by the literary world and the human spiritual world.This thesis aims to explore that irony deconstructs a series of grand narratives regarding value,noble life,human dignity,love,greatness and so on,so as to form a better understanding about the culture clash embodied in the text and enrich the domestic ironic literary criticism.