A Study Of Unnatural Narratives In The Life And Opinion Of Tristram Shandy,Gentleman

The Life and Opinion of Tristram Shandy,Gentleman is a special novel written by Laurence Sterne in the 18 th century.In this novel,Stern challenges a series of literary conventions established since Defoe,breaks the shackles of the narrator’s single identity,clear and fixed physical time,conventional narrative strategies and so on in the traditional novels,and makes the novel possess the unnatural narrative.Based on the comparison with the traditional novels in the 18 th century,this paper studies The Life and Opinion of Tristram Shandy,Gentleman with the theory of unnatural narratology,focusing on the analysis of its unnatural narrator,unconventional narrative time and anti-traditional narrative strategies,so as to highlight the unnatural narrative characteristics of the novel.The introduction brings forward research significance,indicates domestic and foreign research status,and expounds the research method of the thesis.The body consists of four parts: the first part summarizes Stern’s life experience and the main content of the book,and defines the concept of unnatural narrative and its research scope.The second part focuses on the unnatural factor of the narrator,and analyzes the narrator Shandy from three aspects: superhuman ability,multiple narration and mind.It thinks that Shandy is an unnatural narrator who transcends the possibility of human cognition and dispels the first person omniscient narration.The active introspection and strong sense of dialogue in the narration show the narrator’s anti-traditional narrative skills,which reflects the characteristics of the unnatural narrator’s rejection of "objectivity" and return to subjective spirit.The third part focuses on the analysis of the unconventional time of The Life and Opinion of Tristram Shandy,Gentleman.Stern broke through the narrative mode of physical time since the 17 th century and innovatively used the narrative mode of psychological time.He placed the narrative time,story time and reading time in the same text,and multiple times interwoven to achieve the narrative effect of repeated deviation.Its unconventional and unnatural features are highlighted in narrative time,which makes the presentational feature of the story fuzzy to a certain extent.The fourth part analyzes the non-traditional narrative strategy of The Life and Opinion of Tristram Shandy,Gentleman.The essence of unnatural narrative is to oppose the inherent narrative tradition.Stern broke through the traditional narrative structure and narrative language of novels,and used image narrative strategy.He violated the tradition of 18 th century novels in terms of story connection and theme structure,and created a new narrative way,so as to achieve the "parody" of narrative structure;he broke through the traditional rigorous syntactic structure,used a large number of symbols,special typesetting and image narrative to expand the inaccuracy of language,dispelling the narrative mode of words and showing the unnatural narrative strategy in the creation of novels.The conclusion part summarizes the main points of the thesis,including unnatural narrator,unconventional time and non-traditional narrative strategy,and Stern’s anti-imitation art concept.Through the new post-classical theory of unnatural narrative,this thesis reexamines the unique narrative techniques in The Life and Opinion of Tristram Shandy,Gentleman,and then understands the great practice of Stern’s novels.