凯瑟琳·曼斯菲尔德一直以其在短篇小说叙事方式上的创新为评论界所称道,她打破了传统小说以情节为基础的叙事框架,注重挖掘人物的内心世界,不断变换叙事视角;运用叙述者内隐的自由间接引语模式,传达出叙述者和人物的双声效果,使小说融入朦胧的审美色彩;采用透视人物意识活动的意识流手法,重新组合时空秩序,模糊了现实和心理的界限,增强了作品的张力;描写印象式人生场景的片段,捕捉心灵瞬间的顿悟,利用声、光、色等意象和自然景物的象征赋予了作品散文诗的意蕴。
Katherine Mansifeld is well known for her innovative narrative techniques employed in her short stories. The traditional plot-based f ramework is broken. Mansifeld f ocuses on discovering the characters'' inner world and changes the narrative perspective frequently. Free indirect speech is applied to convey a binaural effect, which covers the novel with a hazy aesthetic color. The adoption of stream of consciousness and the recombination of space-time order blurs the boundaries between reality and psychology, thus enhancing the work’s extensibility. With the depiction of the impressionistic f ragment, the capture of the momentary epiphany, the use of such imageries as sound, light, and color, and the description of the symbolic scenery, Mansifeld’s works are given poetic conception.