A Narrative Study on Jennifer Egan's Early Fiction

DOI

10.2991/icelaic-16.2017.71How to use a DOI?

Keywords

Jennifer Egan; The Invisible Circus; Look at Me; narrative; image culture

Abstract

The Invisible Circus, Jennifer Egan's first novel published in 1995, has started her novel-writing career. It focuses on an eighteen-year-old girl Phoebe who has always been haunted by the mysterious death of her hippie older sister and was attracted by the 1960s generation, searching for her own identity. Egan's second fiction, Look at Me, focuses on the stories of two "Charlottes" who are searching for their true selves. This paper explores the narrative strategies in Egan's early fictions, and points out that by mainly employing internal focalization, Egan's first fiction reflects the influence the 1960s counterculture had brought to the protagonists; in Look at Me, Egan adopts alternative narratives to tell the stories of characters. In the process of first-person narrative, Egan uses unreliable first-person narrative to tell the story of the protagonist. This paper concludes that Egan's early fictions deal with issues around the image culture, examining the role of media representation in the 1960s counterculture as well as demonstrating eloquently how often fiction, in its visionary form, speaks of truth.

Copyright

© 2017, the Authors. Published by Atlantis Press.

Open Access

This is an open access article distributed under the CC BY-NC license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/).

Download article (PDF)

TY  - CONF
AU  - Baoyu Nie
PY  - 2016/12
DA  - 2016/12
TI  - A Narrative Study on Jennifer Egan's Early Fiction
BT  - Proceedings of the 2016 3rd International Conference on Education, Language, Art and Inter-cultural Communication (ICELAIC 2016)
PB  - Atlantis Press
SP  - 276
EP  - 286
SN  - 2352-5398
UR  - https://doi.org/10.2991/icelaic-16.2017.71
DO  - 10.2991/icelaic-16.2017.71
ID  - Nie2016/12
ER  -