Abstract

Alice munro is currently one of the world’s most acclaimed contemporary short-story writer, she is also the 2013 Nobel Prize winner. The book Dance of the Happy Shades is Munro’s first published short story collection. It became a success immediately after publishing and won Munro the 1968 Governor General’s Award.                        

Around the world, studies of Munro’s works have already been carried out systematically. While in China, researches on her works are quite inadequate. The  researches already done focus either on feminist understanding of her fictional texts or on narrative strategies of her masterpiece Runaway (2004). Up to now, no scholars in China hava made systematic study of her works and her narrative strategy. 

Dance of the Happy Shades is Munro’s first collection of stories. A careful study of this collection will reaveal that the themes Munro is deeply concerned with in her later works and the narrative strategies applied in her later works have already come into being in her first collection. This paper tries to analyzes Munro’s Dance of the Happy Shades, the analysis based on Gérard Genette’s narrative theory falls into three aspects: narrative time, narrative focalization and narrative discourse. Through detailed analysis, this paper comes to the conclusion that Alice Munro is not only a marvelous observer of life, but also is an excellent story teller equipped with enormous knowledge of narrative strategies.

Key words: Dance of the Happy Shades; time; focalization; narrative discourse

Contents

Abstract

摘要

1. Introduction.1

  1.1 Introduction to Alice Munro and Dance of the Happy Shades1

  1.2 Brief Introduction to Gérard Genette’s Narrative Theory1

2. Literature Review2 

3. Narrative Time3  

  3.1 Order3     

 3.2 Frequency.6

  3.3 Duration.8  

4. Narrative Focalization8

  4.1 Internal Focalization9

  4.2 External Focalization.10

5. Narrative Discourse11 

  5.1 Direct Discourse11

  5.2 Free Direct Discourse13  

6. Conclusion.13 

References