| Summary: | 碩士 === 國立中興大學 === 外國語文學系 === 88 === The narrative strategies are always an important element in literary works. This thesis explores the narrative techniques in Virginia Woolf’s Jacob’s Room and Between the Acts. In the two novels Woolf uses similar ideas of Betolt Brecht’s epic theatre. Such writing techniques could arouse the reader’s examination of his or her relationship to society and individual orientation in history.
Chapter One explains the theory of the epic theatre and its principles relerant to fictional narrative. Brecht uses various ways to break the audience’s empathy, a favorite effect pursued by the traditional theatre. The audience in the epic theatre, discouraged from emotional identity with the theatre characters, could make intellectual critique on social environment, and furthermore to participate actively in social revolution. The alienation-effect in this theatre changes the relationship between stage and the audience, text and performance, and actors and characters in traditional plays. Chapter Two discusses how Woolf uses the dissociated structure and the narrator’s interruption in Jacob’s Room to reveal the patriarchal society Jacob lives in. The narrative devices make the reader aware of the illusion, which is taken for granted in daily life as in Jacob’s world, but must be reexamined. In this chapter, I appropriate some ideas from film production, novels, and the epic theatre to explain the novels’ narrative features. Chapter Three focuses on the centrally placed English historical pageant which discloses man-directed British Empire in Between the Acts. The pageant in many ways is similar to the epic theatre in its representation. By looking at both the play and the characters’ reactions after the performance, the reader would see the social conditions and the characters’ roles in the society from two removes. Chapter Four, the conclusion, explains how the Empire-built man and man-built Empire are interwoven in the two novels; according to my analysis, they are inter-related.
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