Destruction And Order:Dynamics Between Plague And Narration In A Journal Of The Plague Year

A Journal of the Plague Year is a work that recounts the bubonic plague spreading in London in the year of 1665,published by Daniel Defoe in 1722.The book was narrated from the perspective of the first-person narrator H.F.who stayed in the city when the plague approached,witnessing and describing the profound impacts of the epidemic on the city and its citizens.Since the end of the last century,the academic debate over the Journal’s historicity or fictionality has seemed to reach a consensus that the work is a novel created by Defoe with historical materials.This thesis examines the logic of the discussion and proposes the reason why the Journal lies in the junction of history and fiction is not solely the inclusiveness and obscurity of the form of the novel,but more importantly,Defoe’s various artistic designs.Precedents have revealed that Defoe chose to publish the work anonymously to convince the reader of the Journal’s authenticity as a memorial.Departing from the argument,this thesis investigates how Defoe endowed the saddler H.F.who had been preoccupied with business with an motivation and momentum to narrate the stories.Ultimately,Defoe made the plague which served as the context the major drive of the textual progression,thus blurring the boundaries between history and text.Considering the motivation,the plague which destroyed the city’s social structure and challenged people’s cognition prompted H.F.to regain a sense of control and order through writing.In terms of narrative progression(in the temporal sense),the plague created cognitive emptiness as well as narrative gaps,forcing the narrator to represent the plague events through repetition and deviation to redirect the reader’s attention and sympathize with him.Regarding narrative structure(in the spatial sense),the plague that obscured the boundaries between various social and cognitive authorities invoked the narrator’s support of or resistance to these authorities,which strengthened the boundaries and thus reestablished textual order.This research outlines the main criticisms of the Journal and points out that the plague is an issue that has not received sufficient attention in the related narratological criticism.This study scrutinizes H.F.’s motivation for telling by discussing the destructive power of the plague and the creative power of narration.With the analysis of the textual introduction to and the rewriting of authorities in the text,including the physicians,the government,and the quacks,this thesis investigates how the discursive narration contributed to filling narrative gaps and advancing narrative progression.Finally,this research discusses the plague’s decomposition of the authorities and how under such background the narrator re-differentiated and rebuilt them through positive or negative reactions,which horizontally constructed the textual structure.This research proposes that Defoe’s arrangement may deceive the reader that the Journal was H.F.’s attempt to reconstruct an order in the crisis of disorder caused by the plague,the difficulty of which was reflected in the thwarted narration.The narrator gradually established order and control in the progress of telling,during which reality and fictionality as well as historicity and literature influence and echo with each other,eventually contributing to the peculiarity and appeal of the Journal.