Analysis of Temporal Arrangement in Lu Hsun’s “The New Year’s Sacrifice” from the Perspective of Narrative Stylistics

Temporal arrangement refers to the artistic reconstruction of the chronological order of events, a process not only closely related to narrative techniques, but also to stylistic features. In the analysis of temporal arrangement in Lu Hsun’s “The New Year’s Sacrifice”, the three aspects of order, duration, and frequency are discussed on the narratological level. In the aspect of order, a typical round-trip narrative structure is adopted in the story with two types of analepsis reflecting the fragmented and unreliable thoughts of “I”; as for duration, special attention is given to ellipsis and scene, the former arousing readers’ curiosity to fill the blanks with imagination and the later inviting readers to experience the sense of substitution; and in terms of frequency, repetition is prominent in the story, as is shown in the repetitive narratives of Ah Mao’s being taken away by wolf. Meanwhile, the stylistic features of the text are also analyzed, including foregrounding effects of repetition, meticulous arrangement of events’ timing, as well as unconventional grammatical and syntactic structure. The analysis is to uncover the well-constructed narrative structure and carefully-designed stylistic features, so as to help us better understand author’s sympathy towards women of miserable destiny in the old society and criticism against townspeople’s mercilessness, indifference, and numbness. To put it simply, the integration of narratology and stylistics helps us get closer to the implied author and become the implied reader.