Narrative strategies in W.S. Maugham’s short stories

the article is devoted to the study of the narrative technique of the English writer W.S. Maugham. The relevance of this topic is due to the need for modern study of the organization of narrative discourse as a form of artistic communication between the narrator (story-teller) and the recipient (reader). Particular attention is paid to the study of the features of focalization, the type of narration, the position of the narrator and the narrator in the writer's stories. The theoretical and methodological basis of the work is the narratological approach. The main provisions of the narratological theory and methodology of V. Schmid, the typology of narrative texts of G. Genette, the works of M. Bakhtin, N. Tamarchenko, V. Tyupa are used in order to carry out the narratological analysis of W.S. Maugham's short fiction. Research methods. The work uses a comprehensive research methodology: philological, typological and structural-descriptive methods for a systematic examination of the levels and instances of literary communication. The analysis of texts is carried out using structuralist approaches of the narratological school and the basics of receptive aesthetics. The article characterizes the signs of the author's intention in the works and the specificity of the manifestation of narratorial (external in relation to the diegesis) and character (internal) focalization in various aspects: perceptual, speech, temporal, spatial. The defining features of the narrative models of W.S. Maugham's short fiction are summarized in terms of distancing the narrator from the characters.

narratology, diegesis, focalization, narrator, narratator, narrative model, chronotope