关键词: 《福楼拜的鹦鹉》; 行动; 动机; 弱化; 记忆; 现代性; 后现代主义; 叙事策略

Abstract: At present, the interpretation of Flaubert’s Parrot is, on many occasions, conducted from the perspective of postmodern theories, and rarely involves other literary critical methods, which falls short of capturing the genuine theme of the novel. Thus, in the present paper, the theories of modernist literature and those of Nietzsche’s are cited to bridge the gap between Flaubert’s Parrot and the modernist novels. After close scrutiny, we can find that it is far from thorough to classify Flaubert’s Parrot into the postmodern literature. In fact, the postmodern narrative strategies are employed to indicate one of the major themes in modernist novels, namely the weakening of the relationship between action and motivation, which can be traced in the double narrative structure of the novel, that is to say, the surface narrative structure and the deep narrative structure. On the formal level, the weakening endows the novel with the genre of both fiction and non-fiction and such a genre is one of the core concepts in Virginia Woolf’s literary notions. At the same time, the emotional status of the hero is flung into something like limbo. The weakening is not unexpected when we take into account the mixed memories that tangle up in a quite complex semiotic system. To be more specific, neither in the surface narrative structure nor in the deep narrative structure can the narrator distinguish such complex and bewildering memories and thus adopt the reasonable action based on corresponding motivation. In summary, Flaubert’s Parrot exposes the intrusion of memory into the relationship between action and motivation. The intrusion randomizes the development of action, and action is occasionally (and also more often than not) inconsistent with motivation. It may not be a risk to conclude that Flaubert’s Parrot belongs to the modernist works, with the disguise of postmodernism. In this way, the present paper reveals that the tradition of modernist literature is inherited in Flaubert’s Parrot under the postmodern circumstances.

Keywords: action; motivation; weakening; memory; modernity