Fiction and Art of Narrativizing: Narrative Analysis of The Stranger by Katherine Mansfield

Abstract

This paper takes the idea of the art of narration in literature and elaborates on how a literary fictional narrative is both artistically structured and biographical at the same time. For this, a fantabulous narrative The Stranger (1920)by Katherine Mansfield has been selected that splashes several odd narratives by contextualizing a mysterious death embedded in the plot. Throughout the protagonists remain interconnected and in complex circumstances dotted with undefined fantastical linguistic expressions. To explore and explain these overloaded odd and intriguing narratives in the story, this study follows a tri-part framework for theoretical underpinning. Each approach has its particular principles and guidelines connected to the narrative analysis. The first approach deals withtext as linguistic structure, second text as cognitive structure by following William Labov (1972) narrative analysis model and finally beyond the text respectively. Tri-part narrative analysis of the text reveals that the conflict in the fictional narration influenced by the dominant role of the narrator in making characters more or less static. Further, the narrative has been conveyed with a vantage point and the protagonists are consumed by it which creates different linguistic and narrative odds. Apart from the plotentails a great concern of sceptic sequences common to the time and life of the narrator.