Narrative Arts Of Peter Carey’s Novels

Peter Carey entered the literary world in the 1970 s as a New Writer.He has made constant innovations and breakthroughs during more than 40 years of literary career.Most of his works are based on the history and reality of Australia,from which he finds his creation materials and sources.Carey lives in an era of realism,modernism,postmodernism,post-colonialism,magical realism and so on.Therefore,his novels organically integrate various narrative techniques and form diverse narrative arts,so as to present a rich and complex picture of Australian history and reality,and achieve the purpose of re-examining history and reality.From the narrative perspective,we can find out the writer’s cognition of the world,his love and hate for the characters,as well as the aesthetic tastes in the novels.Carey is good at focusing on one perspective and cooperating flexibly with other perspectives to achieve the purpose of expected narration.The omniscient perspective is not only conducive to the free access to the spiritual world of the characters,but also can comprehensively show the broad historical background and natural environment of Australia and other countries.The first-person retrospective external perspective and the first-person participatory internal perspective focus on the presentation of the narrator’s rich and complex subjective emotions.The first-person spectator external perspective emphasizes that the narrator can both tell the story calmly and make comments at any time.The flexible use of the above four perspectives has increased the depth and artistic tension of Carey’s novels.The perception and control of time reflect the writer’s tendency in plot development,characterization and thematic expression.On the basis of traditional narration,Carey uses flashbacks and pre-narrations to mix the past,present and future,reflecting his grasp of chronological order.Carey compresses or stretches time with different types of time interval,resulting in uneven narrative speed.Both of them show the writer’s intention to control the narrative rhythm and highlight the theme of the novel.In addition to the narrative skills of the above narrative perspective and time setting,Carey uses a variety of unique artistic techniques to achieve the desired narrative effect.He rewrites classic events and characters with imitation and parody,and transforms history and life to express the writer’s moral and aesthetic ideals.At the same time,He combines magic realism with Australian characteristics to present the magical Australian history and reality in an artistic way,which has profound implications.Peter Carey is an important representative of contemporary Australian literature.He has built a colorful world of novels with rich and varied narrative techniques.He has made outstanding achievements in the exploration,trial and innovation of novel narrative techniques,which is worthy of further study,attention and research.