ZhuXiaoling
I. Introduction
As “finest achievements of England’s greatest novelist”, ① Bleak House has its distinction in two aspects: the deion of English society in Victorian period as an organization with all its members unexceptionally connected with each other; and the employment of double narrators to unfold this connection. Within this narrative framework, one thing is obvious: the curiosity with its various forms and functions, that Charles Dickens ingeniously designed and depicted, plays an important role in achieving coherence of narrations of two different narrators and in indicating possibilities of different interpretations of all the narrative details.
II. Three Levels of Curiosity
It is not surprising that a reader, in reading a literary work, keeps asking himself questions and tries to find answers to them when he is curious to know further about the work. It can be argued that it is the curiosity that attracts him to read on. For the part of an author, correspondingly, he should try every means to make readers curious if he wants to enjoy popularity with them. So it is small wonder that Dickens “resorts to a thousand artifices to excite curiosity”. ②
But what is new in Bleak House is not that we constantly encounter occasions on which our curiosity is evinced. For example, Guppy feels confused on seeing the portrait of Lady Dedlock, which, though he has never seen the Lady, impresses him with a resemblance to someone he met before. His confusion is mentioned in such a repeated way that we may feel so curious as to ask why it is so.
The structural origiZhuXiaoling，School of Foreign Languages, Lanzhou Jiaotong University.
nality of Bleak House also lies in the fact that so many curious characters are created in their relation to the two themes of the novel—the Chancery matters and the Dedlock mystery—that satisfying their curiosity becomes the core impetus for the narrative development.