The Story of a Country House is one of the Swedish novelist Selma Lagerlöf’s short stories collected in her work From a Swedish Homestead.One of the crucial features in the story’s narrative is its telling of c...The Story of a Country House is one of the Swedish novelist Selma Lagerlöf’s short stories collected in her work From a Swedish Homestead.One of the crucial features in the story’s narrative is its telling of certain events and immediate retelling of part of that events by adopting another perspective,resulting in the overlapping of the narration of events that occur either in parallel with each other in the same time period in the story or in sequential time periods that happen to have significance on one another,thus the zigzag narration.We can see that the zigzag rendering of narration that does not follow the linear time order not only highlights the importance of the time period overlapped,but also leaves room for the introduction of different perspectives of various characters,if the introduction of a different perspective and voice is not the only purpose of shifting back the narrative time.We readers are thus granted access to more than one individual’s mindset to come to terms with the experiences partially shared by these characters to form a fuller picture of the whole situation.展开更多
文摘The Story of a Country House is one of the Swedish novelist Selma Lagerlöf’s short stories collected in her work From a Swedish Homestead.One of the crucial features in the story’s narrative is its telling of certain events and immediate retelling of part of that events by adopting another perspective,resulting in the overlapping of the narration of events that occur either in parallel with each other in the same time period in the story or in sequential time periods that happen to have significance on one another,thus the zigzag narration.We can see that the zigzag rendering of narration that does not follow the linear time order not only highlights the importance of the time period overlapped,but also leaves room for the introduction of different perspectives of various characters,if the introduction of a different perspective and voice is not the only purpose of shifting back the narrative time.We readers are thus granted access to more than one individual’s mindset to come to terms with the experiences partially shared by these characters to form a fuller picture of the whole situation.