Abstract
In the light of the inevitable twinning of linguistic theory and literary critical interpretation and appreciation, Ray Bradbury's narrative techniques constitute his own thematic and aesthetic discourse. Bradbury’s stylistic narrative discourse evokes a set of narrative tools through which characters communicate ideas, thoughts, and feelings, creating aesthetic effects that appeal to readers. These blended artistic elements are interpreted in the light of theoretical fictional context of narrator-character, character-character, narrator-reader interactions. Exploring a web of narrative-characterization centers in Bradbury’s story Cistern, the paper sheds light on the centers of point of view, dialogic narrative technique, and thematic concerns that include internal and external conflicts. Meantime, the paper draws on Gerard Genette’s analytical method of study of narrative discourse, among others. Moreover, Bradbury's themato-narrative techniques offer a fresh interpretative community for understanding his narrative characterization centers and serve as a receptionist case study for scholars and critics of modern literary criticism. Article visualizations:
Highlights
Narrative FrameThe story narrates the life of two autist sisters in a setting of one day; they spend a long time sitting in the dining room
Introduction RayBradbury’s Cistern is a composite story for it has a set of competing elements
Paul Simpson (2004: 8) points out that: contemporary stylistics looks towards language as discourse: that is, towards a text’s status as discourse, a writer’s deployment of discourse strategies and towards the way a text ‘means’ as a function of language in context.... − the way a text is constructed in language will, after all, have a crucial bearing on the way it functions as discourse
Summary
The story narrates the life of two autist sisters in a setting of one day; they spend a long time sitting in the dining room. While Juliet is poking a needle in her white dress, Anna resumes her exotic story, where she imagines that there are a man and a woman living inside a cistern under the road in that dead city At this particular event, Anna flashbacks her past, in which she has had a desperate love story with a man who loves her much, but she could not get him, and he mysteriously dies. Bradbury’s fiction is meant to show events and episodes not to tell them, paying special attention to diction, style, characterization, techniques, points of view, the plot as basic components of true art On his part, Zhiqin Zhang (2010) emphasizes that the center of critical literary stylistics examines the “thematic and aesthetic values generated by linguistic forms” (155). Timothy Whiffen (2013) remarks that Bradbury’s artistic style “suits the tone of his narratives,” in which he evokes various thematic images “to place his readers within the oppressive worlds that encompass his plots.”
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