Though a bit strange to Chinese readers, Margaret Drabble is well known in Britain literature field. Her novels mainly reflect the life of middle class woman intellectual. And The Waterfall （1967） is in the book lis...Though a bit strange to Chinese readers, Margaret Drabble is well known in Britain literature field. Her novels mainly reflect the life of middle class woman intellectual. And The Waterfall （1967） is in the book list that must be read by English majors. This paper mainly analyzes the narrative characteristics of Margaret Drabble＇s famous novel The Waterfall from three aspects ofnarratology, narrative temporality, focalization, and narrating voice. The Waterfall is unique in writing style： It has no chapters, and each part is divided by asterisk, what is more, ＂I＂ and ＂she＂ appear alternatively. It consists of two alternatively appeared plotlines, one is the line of story, the other is the line of psychology. In the line of story, traditional narrative techniques are usually used, whereas in the line of psychology, new narrative techniques are often found. All these show that the author is trying to adopt new writing form, while at the same time she cannot completely give up the old ones. Therefore, this novel appears half-old and half-new characteristics in narrative characteristics.展开更多
文摘Though a bit strange to Chinese readers, Margaret Drabble is well known in Britain literature field. Her novels mainly reflect the life of middle class woman intellectual. And The Waterfall （1967） is in the book list that must be read by English majors. This paper mainly analyzes the narrative characteristics of Margaret Drabble＇s famous novel The Waterfall from three aspects ofnarratology, narrative temporality, focalization, and narrating voice. The Waterfall is unique in writing style： It has no chapters, and each part is divided by asterisk, what is more, ＂I＂ and ＂she＂ appear alternatively. It consists of two alternatively appeared plotlines, one is the line of story, the other is the line of psychology. In the line of story, traditional narrative techniques are usually used, whereas in the line of psychology, new narrative techniques are often found. All these show that the author is trying to adopt new writing form, while at the same time she cannot completely give up the old ones. Therefore, this novel appears half-old and half-new characteristics in narrative characteristics.
