A Study On Indeterminacy In Lighthousekeeping From The Perspective Of Postmodernism

Jeanette Winterson is one of the most outstanding and controversial novelists in contemporary Britain.Her experimental novels are unique in both theme and narrative form,and she is a well-deserved experimental novelist with strong personal style.Many works of her have brought fame and praise for her,which has made her highly respectable in the field of British fiction,and has established her unshakable position in the English literatus.Founded in 1889,Granta,a veteran Cambridge University magazine,lists her as the “best of young British writers”.Lighthousekeeping(2004)is Winterson’s eighth novel and was nominated for the Commonwealth Writers Prizes in 2005.Critics and researchers have made analyses and interpretations from the perspectives of themes and narrative for this novel while its postmodernism characteristics are rarely systematically researched.In this thesis the indeterminacy characteristics in Lighthousekeeping are analyzed with the employment of postmodern theory and criticism.The thesis is divided into three parts: introduction,body and conclusion,and the body is composed of three chapters.Chapter one is introduction.It mainly includes the introduction to Jeanette Winterson and her representative works,Lighthousekeeping,the current situation of Jeanette Winterson’s novels at home and abroad,and brief introduction to the theory of indeterminacy on postmodernism.Chapter two to four are the main part of the thesis.Chapter two mainly systematically analyzes indeterminacy of language consisting of word game of language and visional reality constructed by language.The word game of language is developed from three aspects,namely,paradoxical language,differance and naming game.The visional reality constructed by language is reflected in two parts: one is boundaries between truth and falseness blurred by language,and the other is fictionality exposed by language.Chapter three explores indeterminacy of plot.Winterson uses the narrative of disordered time and missing plot to break down the determinacy of plot.Disordered time is embodied in three aspects,namely,fragmentation of time,ambiguity of start time and time dislocation of character narrative.Missing plot is shown with the fragmentary plot,blank plot and the open ending.Chapter four demonstrates the indeterminacy of image.It mainly includes indeterminacy of character and narrator’s identity.Indeterminacy of character is embodied in Dark and Silver,and the indeterminacy of narrator’s identity is divided into young Silver,Pew and adult Silver as a narrator respectively.The last part is conclusion.This thesis holds that Jeanette Winterson utilizes the postmodern skills in Lighthousekeeping to show the main characteristics of postmodernism—indeterminacy,and systematically expounds this characteristic reflected in Lighthousekeeping through the indeterminacy of language,plot,image.