摘 要

短篇小说《苍蝇》是英国著名作家凯瑟琳•曼斯菲尔德晚年的代表作，也是其巧妙运用叙事策略的成功典范。该小说精心描绘了老伍德菲尔德访友、老板回忆爱子和苍蝇死亡三件微不足道的日常琐事，来表现作者对于战争和生命的感知。本文通过分析无情节的叙事结构、多重的叙事视角以及象征和反讽的叙事语言这三个方面来解读作者是如何巧妙地运用叙事策略深化小说的主题—对战争创伤的严肃探究和对生命意义的深刻思考。

关键词：凯瑟琳•曼斯菲尔德；《苍蝇》；叙事策略

Contents

1. Introduction...............................................................................................................1

2. Demonstration...........................................................................................................2

2.1. The adoption of plotless narrative structure.......................................................2

2.1.1. Episodic narration........................................................................................3

2.1.2. Open ending.................................................................................................4

2.2. The employment of multiple narrative perspectives...........................................5

2.2.1. Limited third-person perspective.................................................................5

2.2.2. Shifting of perspectives...............................................................................6

2.3. The application of symbolic and ironical narrative language.............................7

2.3.1. Symbolic language.......................................................................................7

2.3.2. Ironical language..........................................................................................9

1. Conclusion...............................................................................................................10

Works Cited..................................................................................................................12

Bibliography.................................................................................................................13

A Study of the Narrative Strategies in Katherine Mansfield’s The Fly

1. Introduction

Katherine Mansfield (1888-1923), a miracle of the literary world, contributed all her life to the writing of short stories and pushed it into an unprecedented peak. Honored as “British Chekhov ”(Jiang Hong, 9), she is a core figure in the history of the development of the modern short story, as well as one of the few female writers famous only for writing short stories in British literature history. Although her writing career is very short, her works are extremely rich. In just 14 years she wrote 88 short stories and a lot of literary criticisms, such as In a German Pension(1911), Bliss(1920), The Garden Party(1922) and so on. Mansfield's works do not provide major deafening themes, nor sharp philosophical warnings, but they have profound connotations.

With her keen power of observation, delicate conception, exquisite style, undemonstrative narrative techniques and desalination in plot processing, Mansfield is unique in narration. The plot of Mansfield's works is presented in the form of fragments, but the characters' inner world is completely revealed. By depicting and combining different life frames, she created many excellent works with distinctive personality to explain the most ordinary but again the most profound essence of life. The Fly is one of her most representative works. Written in early 1922, The Fly is an important work of Mansfield in old age as well as a successful model of the employment of narrative strategies.

Most of the domestic and foreign researchers have high appreciation of Mansfield's short stories. As for the research on The Fly, the magazine Interpreter published a series of brief comments which attracted many critics to join in the interpretations and comments on this short story when it was first published in 1922 . Though The Fly is just composed of about two thousand words, there seems to be no end to the explanation and analysis on it. Wills D. Jacobs discusses the themes of The Fly from different aspects and on deeper levels. Kai Jansson analyses the symbolic meanings of each character in “The Use of Symbolism in Katherine Mansfield’ s The Fly”. At present, Chinese scholars’ studies on The Fly mainly focus on the aspects such as theme, symbol, image and characterization to interpret this work. As for the research on its narrative strategies, it is scanty: there are only a few articles published on the periodicals of several unknown colleges.