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Narration of Novel: Narrative Techniques
nine common narrative techniques.

This means that in order to avoid telling a straightforward story, the author set up a suspense in the first paragraph of the novel, which enveloped the whole article and deliberately created a puzzle for readers to arouse their interest in reading.

For example, a pair of bright eyes published by Hubei Daily on July 5, 1964 adopted this technique. The beginning of this article is:

It's dark at night, and I can't see my fingers. I (the protagonist) went to a production brigade. Because of my first visit, Lu Sheng, and the fact that there was no moon or stars, and I didn't bring my flashlight, I was really anxious. Just then, I met a member who lived in the brigade I was going to, and led me away. Along the way, he said later: "comrade, pay attention, there is a ditch ahead!" "After a while, he pointed out to me:" Comrade, pay attention to the mouth pond on the left! "Finally, when I entered the village, I pointed to an alley and said," There lives our captain. He will greet you. " But the next morning, I came out of the captain's room and saw a strong middle-aged man, carrying a bucket and humming a brisk tune, coming to the weir pond next to the rice field. When he approached, I glanced at him. Hey, what a good man! How can he be blind? Just thinking about it, I saw that he didn't care much about carrying water in the underground pond. I was surprised and shouted, "... it's a pond, don't fall into the water." He turned around and blinked, as if he saw me: "Aren't you the comrade I showed you the way last night? "...

Seeing this, the reader can't help asking himself: Is he blind? Why can you lead people away at night so neatly? Why is he brighter than the "eyes" of people with eyes? This is called "cutting into suspense", and the following is waiting for the author's "flashback event"-the reader will have to read on.

Chaplin, a world art master, famously said, "I always try to create unexpected things in new ways. If I believe that the audience expects me to walk in the street, then I will jump into a carriage. " (Quoted from Chaplin-The Great Tramp), this tells us that the first step is to "surprise" the creative structure skillfully. But more importantly, the plot described must be reasonable. The so-called "reasonable" means that this kind of "surprise" is in tune with the development of the characters in the novel, which conforms to the objective law and the logic of life. It's not absurd, it's not imaginary. It is both bizarre and natural.

For example, the American writer O 'Henry's The Gift of the Magi did this very skillfully.

The novel tells the story of a loving couple preparing to give gifts to each other on Christmas Day in the United States, and both want to buy something unexpected for each other. The wife saw that her husband had an ancestral gold watch, but there was no bracelet, so she cut off her most precious golden eldest daughter and sold it, and used the money from selling blonde hair to buy a watch chain. What about the husband? Seeing that his wife has a beautiful blonde hair, but lacks a set of suitable expensive combs, she sold her ancestral watch, which she always accompanied with her, and she also cherished it very much, and bought a set of beautiful and luxurious combs with the money from selling watches. As a result, when the two met, the husband took the new watch chain sent by his wife and the watch was gone; The wife took a new set of combs from her husband, and her long blonde hair was gone! The couple had to smile sadly at each other.

here, although there is a "surprise" to the story owner and readers, it is all reasonable. Because their husband and wife love each other more than their feelings for "blonde hair" and "watch chain". And the capitalist world of "money first" can only be such a spicy ending for the lower-level little people.

On the surface, this creative method has no unexpected plot, no fierce contradictions and conflicts, and it is straightforward and has always been a faint atmosphere. However, in this straightforward narrative, there are feelings that attack the soul; In this faint desolation, there is an indescribable charm of life, which is often "ruthless" and more affectionate, and silence is better than sound.

For example, Picking Up Ears of Wheat, written by Zhang Jie, is about a little girl in the countryside whose family is very poor. Every summer, when harvesting wheat, she always takes a basket to pick up ears of wheat in the threshed wheat field. At this time, an old man selling maltose came. Other children exchanged the gleaned wheat ears for sugar with the old man, but the little girl could not bear to part with it. The old man often knocks candy for her for free. Others laughed at her and said that she would marry this old man. She didn't know much about it, and the old man thought it was nothing. Everyone was just joking and never mentioned it again. But she-this little girl, when the old man didn't come to sell sugar again, she was waiting at the village head, waiting ...

What was she waiting for? Just to eat the old man's candy? No, there is an indefinable smell in it, a faint sadness, an emotion that people can communicate with each other … This is called "gathering of form and spirit", which is a "unstructured" structure and a "complex" style woven with an inner spirit.

When the author is writing a novel, the director who seems to direct the play often lets the characters on the stage take props of one kind or another. A good director will use this "prop" to make not only one role, but also many roles related to this "prop"; Let not only one party, but both sides of the contradiction deal with this "prop". In this way, we can dig out the spiritual world of the characters from this "prop", expose the essence of life and complete the author's aesthetic thought on this discovery.

This is the short story "Twenty shillings of Silver Coin" by contemporary British writer Stan barstow. We see that the "2-shilling silver coin" itself is a prop of the author. Using this prop, the author first asked the rich Mrs. maston in the article to put it into a suit on purpose, and then asked her servant Mrs. Fordyck to send the suit to the laundry, but confessed that before sending it to the laundry, she had to dig out her pocket. Fordyke is a poor man, her husband is paralyzed, and she needs money badly. How much joy this silver coin should bring her: you can buy fruit, cigarettes and a bottle of wine for your poor husband; You can also buy some clothes that you have to buy ... And Mrs. maston hopes that Fordyck will quietly hide this silver coin and spend the twenty shillings, and then she will ask Fordyck to pay the money. If Fordyck can't pay it, she will achieve her goal, proving that the poor are mean and dirty, and she is noble.

You see, the author naturally kills two birds with one stone by using this prop. It not only shows the material poverty of the poor in the world, but also exposes the spiritual shamelessness of the rich, and profoundly reveals how cruel the relationship between people in this world is! The end of this novel is: After a hard ideological struggle, Mrs. Fordyck finally didn't use this "trap" money. When Mrs. maston asked, she gave it back trembling ... But this "silver coin of twenty shillings" has left a deep imprint on readers' minds.

novelists should learn to discover the hidden inevitability of accident in life and use the inevitability of accident when writing novels. It can cause readers to search for the root of the dish and follow it with relish, and it can reveal the essential meaning that is not easy to find in life.

For example, Mo Bosang, the author of the French novel The Necklace, used this technique beautifully. The story goes like this: Mrs. Loire, the wife of a clerk, borrowed a necklace from her girlfriend to wear when she was preparing to attend an upper-class party in order to win people's favor and be envied. That night, the necklace and her beauty really made her shine. Unexpectedly, she was so happy that she lost her necklace on her way home. In order to compensate for the necklace, she had to bear financial pressure. After ten years of hard work, she and her husband paid off the debt they owed for buying the necklace. Who knows, just after she paid off the debt, she found that the necklace she had borrowed was fake. It's really a one-night limelight that gets ten years of bitterness, and a moment of vanity gets half a life of pain.

This series of plots of "Dream Necklace" → "Borrow Necklace" → "Lose Necklace" → "Return Necklace" → "Fake Necklace" all conceal "the inevitability of accident, the accident of necessity", which is fascinating and thought-provoking.

In the face of some people's spiritual crisis, modern novelists have a sense of fear. Therefore, they often use absurd, surreal and purely subjective imaginary "abstract" things to weave and describe-to reflect their world view. Moreover, in writing, on the surface, it is often separated, stream of consciousness and difficult to understand. However, after careful reading, we will find that these novels are interrelated, complementary, mutually reinforcing and integrated. It can be called "silver silk beads, counting points and one line".

For example, the short story After, written by American writer Henry Sliesa. It reflects the horror of nuclear war and talks about the world after the nuclear war. The nuclear war has not happened now, how to describe it? Modernist writers use them to break the "fragments" of the contemporary world and tell them subjectively and absurdly. After * * * is divided into four sections: Doctor, Lawyer, Merchant and Chief. There is no connection between this doctor, lawyer, businessman and chief, which seems to be irrelevant. But what the "Doctor" paragraph says is that he used to teach Memetics and train students to develop perfect memories, and has published six monographs on this subject. But after the nuclear war, he lost his job, and people don't want to remember it anymore. The horror of the nuclear war makes people dare not remember it! So, he had to teach "crash course"-"so hard to forget". The paragraph "Lawyers" said: In the past, murderers were sentenced to capital punishment, but after the nuclear war, the population decreased by 9%, and the ratio in seven lonely days was 8: 1. Therefore, the male murderer's current capital punishment is: marry 18 women, bringing the total number of his wives to 31. The paragraph "Businessman" tells that he thought that after the nuclear war, many people died and the sales of clothing products would plummet, but an eugenics professor told him that due to atomic radiation, a child has two heads, which is close to 65% of the total number of births. Therefore, clothing products including hats will gradually sell well and the demand is in short supply. Businessmen are relieved. The paragraph "Chief" tells that several civilized white people ran to a remote isolated island to avoid atomic radiation poison. They took an instrument with them-a metal object with a small opening. Anyone who has atomic radiation poison will make a sound as soon as he looks at it. After these white people met with the indigenous chiefs on the island, they used this instrument to test: at that time, the natives on the island aimed at the instrument, and the instrument was silent; And white people look at the instruments, and the instruments are screaming. The white man was overjoyed and asked to stay. But after the white people entered the village, the chief ordered them to be killed and ate their meat with his men. As a result, they were infected with atomic radiation poison, and then they aimed at the instrument, which sounded. From then on, atomic radiation poison was not spared anywhere.

These four paragraphs are incoherent, which can be called "the pen breaks the meaning constantly", and they are connected by four different absurd aspects, reflecting the mentality of some classes in the world after the nuclear war. In this way, modernist writers put on their outlook on life for the present and the future.

this novel technique is to use two clues in the text, one bright and one dark, to cross in parallel, and to draw a character from a character and a story from a story, which not only makes the two characters and two stories have a close relationship, but also enriches the characters' personalities and promotes the deepening of the theme.

This is the case with the novel Medicine written by Lu Xun. The bright line of the story is: During the late Qing Dynasty, Xiao Shuan, the son of Hua Laoshuan, got consumption, and people said that it would be fine to eat blood steamed bread for the disease, so Lao Shuan waited until the yamen killed someone one morning, so he took foreign money to buy steamed bread stained with prisoners' blood and hurriedly took it home for Xiao Shuan to eat. The secret line of this article is: Early that morning when Lao Shuan went to get the blood steamed bread, the prisoner who was killed was revolutionary Xia Yu, and Xiao Shuan ate his blood steamed bread, but this medicine did not cure Xiao Shuan's illness. Xiao Shuan was finally killed by consumption. The author connects these two lines of light and shade, forming a double ring-in the cemetery at the end of this article, Xiao Shuan's tomb and Xia Yu's tomb are scattered together, and Xiao Shuan's mother and Xia Yu's mother are both burying their sons' graves and burning paper ...

The theme of Medicine is: "Ignorant people enjoy the blood of revolutionaries, which is not a good medicine to cure their illness; The revolution in which the bourgeoisie is divorced from the masses is not a good medicine to save China society. " Naturally, he ran out of the graveyard.

This creative technique is that the author might as well hold down the characters he intends to express, just like the fist that reaches out to hit people, and shrink back first. In this way, hitting out is more powerful; And the person who is ready to belittle, you might as well let him be "down a peg or two" first, and then let him fall from the "down a peg or two", and then "fall" even worse. Here, let's take a look at the typical example of "wanting to promote first", which is "My First Superior" written by Ma Feng.

The main character in the novel is Tian, deputy director of the county agricultural construction bureau. On the surface, this old field is disheveled, covered with a rotten cotton-padded jacket, listless, exhausted and slow, and hardly looks like a leader. However, with the gradual deepening of his works, the sudden rise of a different peak: he was familiar with the overall situation, confident, courageous and brave in the process of emergency rescue in Haimen, regardless of the arthritis that had never been good and serious in the flood control in 1954, and took the lead in fighting in the stormy waves until he defeated the danger!

It is by using the technique of "restraining first and promoting later" that the work creates a living socialist hero.

There are examples of "trying to suppress and promote first" in all kinds of novels, such as "Wu Song drunk and beat Jiang Menshen" in Water Margin. The author first describes how powerful Jiang Menshen is. Many people with high martial arts skills are no match for him. This is "promoting first", but as soon as Wu Song appeared, Jiang Menshen fell down in a few rounds: on the one hand, it set off the power of Wu Song, on the other hand. These two kinds of writing are often used interchangeably and complement each other.

Novels with this technique are generally simple in theme, single in scene, few in characters and relatively dull in plot. However, how to create a full image and dig out a deeper theme from a simple theme and a short space, you have to "hide the moon in the basin and see the big from the small."

The following is a brief introduction of the Rattan Chair written by writer Ye Wenling in this way: A middle school teacher, Yang Jian, got back a new rattan chair sent to him by the school, and the whole family was happy. But after being happy, everyone thought, where should I put the new rattan chair? In this 15-square-meter room where it runs in the family, six people, old and young, live, even a chair can't be squeezed in now. Therefore, Lao Yang had to return the cane chair to the school with pity.

Look, this work has no legend, no complicated plot, so ordinary people and small things, so straightforward, so faint and sad ... but it really shocked the readers' hearts! After 3 years of liberation, why are Miss Yang's family still living in a snail-like room? ! It's true that it's the "ignorant people" policy of the gang of four for ten years, and it's the mental pollution emitted by the "king of blank paper" ... Besides, should we be sober and clear-headed, and get rid of the residual poison of these "ignorant people" and the "blank paper" prejudice as soon as possible! Let the rattan chair and something more important than it come to Mr. Yang's home? ! The sea can hold the bright moon, and even a small pot of water can hold the bright moon. How to see the big one with a small one depends on the author's skill in using this method.