The Study of Postmodernist Narrative Technique of Chinese Box in Michael Cunningham s The Hours

The purpose of this research is to identify postmodern narrative technique in Michael Cunningham’s The Hours (1998) which both in title and content indebts to Mrs Dalloway (1925) a modern novel by Virginia Woolf, in the light of Brian McHale s Ontological Foregrounding strategy. McHale suggests that postmodernist literatureforegrounds its ontological structure as opposed to modernist literature and accordingly through Postmodernisttechniques such as Chinese Box and Tromp l oeil the reader loses the boundaries between fiction and reality because of unreal reality and the real is affected by the creation of the mimicry of the real and fiction so reality becomesmultiplicated. This research represents some theories of postmodern narrative with focus on The Hours and goes through thedifferent techniques applied in the mentioned novel. The research will conclud that Michael Cunningham has used postmodern narrative techniques to create his own special style of narrative within narrative to tell the story of three women that are all related to each other in one way or another and show their concerns and pains.

کلیدواژه ها:

Chinese Box ، Ontological Foregrounding ، The Hours ، Michael Cunningham ، Postmodernist Narrative Technique