Narrative Art of Hemingway's Novels -- Comparative Literature and Culture Series

Author: Zhang Wei
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2005-02-01
Features: Research on the American 20th-century novelist Ernest Hemingway by domestic and international scholars has reached a considerable scale, offering in-depth discussions. However, there are still many gaps, such as in 1954 when Hemingway won the Nobel Prize in Literature, the award citation praised his "mastery of modern narrative art." Unfortunately, this major literary contribution of Hemingway has received relatively little research both domestically and internationally, with only scattered small articles. This thesis focuses on this essence, analyzing Hemingway's novels from the perspective of narratology, uncovering his exquisite techniques in using narrative modes, narrative time, narrative context, and narrative voice. The author argues that Hemingway's novels employ two narrative modes: In hardboiled fiction, the mode is as follows: the protagonist seeks to achieve a goal, but an obstacle hinders its realization. He strives to overcome it but fails, or even if he succeeds, he dies, yet his spirit remains unbroken. In non-hardboiled fiction, the mode is: the protagonist's life is unsatisfactory, and he wishes to change but lacks proactive action, resigning himself to maintaining a mediocre status quo. In embodying these two modes, Hemingway uses five narrative structures: causal linear structure, circular layered structure, collage block structure, interwoven correspondence structure, and stream-of-consciousness psychological structure. He navigates the realm of structural art with ease, moving freely. Hemingway deeply understands the subtle impact of narrative time on narration. He skillfully balances the relationship between narrative time and story time, employing techniques such as chronological narration, internal flashback, external flashback, partial flashback, complete flashback, direct foreshadowing, and indirect foreshadowing, making the narrative sequence endlessly varied. By utilizing the non-synchronous relationship between narrative time and story time, he constructs four temporal distance states: omission, summary, scene, and pause. He adjusts the frequency of narration to create narrative rhythm, varying between urgency and leisure, tension and relaxation, composing a captivating symphony of fiction. The greatest difference between Hemingway and other writers lies in his preference for "showing" rather than "telling" stories about life, striving to minimize subjective coloration while maintaining an objective narrative style. To diversify his narrative techniques, he alternates between authorial narrative context, third-person narrative context, and character narrative context, intersecting zero focus, internal focus, and external focus to form a multi-angle perspective network. The narrative voice in Hemingway's novels shifts between being singular and polyphonic, blending multiple voices such as the real author, implied author, narrator, and characters. He coordinates the strength and weakness of these narrative voices according to the needs of the work. Due to his pursuit of objectivity, Hemingway's control of voice leans toward the voice of characters, weakening that of the narrator, especially in stream-of-consciousness novels and those dominated by dialogue. To highlight the voice of characters, Hemingway extensively uses absent narration in his texts. However, in other works, he adopts overt meta-narration to emphasize the author's voice, expressing his artistic insights and attitudes toward life. In the long river of literature, Hemingway's narrative art surpassed his American predecessors, significantly enhancing the distinctive characteristics of American literature, and early adopted certain modernist techniques. He also led his contemporaries. Faced with the formidable tradition of European fiction, Hemingway bravely challenged and innovated, reshaping and integrating, transforming the lengthy, monotonous, and slow-paced narrative mode of traditional European fiction. He revolutionized the narrative techniques, rhythm, and style of fiction, giving European fiction a complete overhaul. He used less omniscient narrative context and more character narrative context and internal focus, less exposition and more omission, fewer typical settings and direct depiction of people and events, making narration freer, more direct, and dynamic, creating a minimalist yet vigorous novelistic art. Hemingway's narrative art has spread to every corner of the world, exerting a profound influence on world literature. Countless writers study and imitate him, and he fully deserves the title of a master of fiction. This thesis breaks new ground in Hemingway research in the following ways: First, previous Hemingway research lacked strong theoretical foundations and uniformity, being piecemeal, while this paper systematically interprets Hemingway using narratological theory, a first in China. Second, it adopts structuralist and narratological research methods, combining close reading of the text with theoretical discussion, supplemented by some intuitive display diagrams, aiming for thorough and clear explanations. Third, the entire paper uses a consistent discourse system, appearing focused and cohesive. Fourth, it gives due attention and exploration to some lesser-known novels of Hemingway,ing the gap in breadth and making Hemingway research more comprehensive. Fifth, it provides textual analysis evidence for the burgeoning narratological research both domestically and internationally.