The Narrative Art Of "The Prisoner Bird"

Jailbird is the ninth work written by Kurt Vonnegut who is a famous novelist in American history.Since it was published,this novel has received warm response from all walks of life.Based on the theory of narratology,this thesis makes a systematic analysis of Kurt Vonnegut's novel Jailbird and explains it from three perspectives:narrative perspective,narrative time and narrative structure.This thesis consists of three chapters.Chapter One addresses different kinds of narrative perspectives in Jailbird including omnipotent perspective,first-person retrospective perspective and transgression of focalization on the basis of former classification of narrative perspectives.Chapter Two mainly focuses on narrative time sequence,narrative time span and narrative frequency to elaborate the characteristics of narrative time in Jailbird.Chapter Three probes into the narrative structure of Jailbird,which is meta-fiction and circular narrative structure respectively.The above studies of three aspects lead to the following conclusions: Vonnegut adopts pluralistic narrative forms in the creation of Jailbird;the themes that are Vonnegut's satire on American capitalist society and people's helpless on current situation are hidden in the changeable forms;arouse people to think about the theme of Jailbird through creative narrative forms.