abstract
john fowles is regarded as one of the greatest postmodernist novelists in literary world. in the past twenty years, the studies of john fowles and his work have become an industry in the literary field at home and abroad. but the majority of these studies have tended to attach great importance to his famous novels such as the french lieutenant’s woman, the collector and the magus. there are two trends in these studies: the focus only on the narrative arts or only on the theme. and few approaches have been made in the connection between the narrative arts and the theme. fowles’s 1977 novel daniel martin, the labor of seven years, is another experiment in postmodernist narrative arts. it is fowles’s first novel to narrate a mature protagonist. however, there are few literary studies on its narrative arts except some reviews on its theme.
narrative variation and the theme “self-knowledge quest” have always been john fowles’s two artistic aims since he published his first novel. his skillful ways of different fusions of narrative arts and the themes can be considered as his real art. therefore, this thesis aims to analyze the fusion of the narrative arts and the theme in daniel martin. the innovative interpretation and comparison will help us forge a deep insight into fowles’s novelistic world, and thus is a push to our further understanding of this great english novelist as well as a literary theorist.
this thesis consists of four chapters besides conclusion. the first chapter provides background information of the paper, including an introduction to john folwes, a synopsis of daniel martin, purpose and significance of the study and a summary of contents of this paper. in the second chapter, the theory of postmodernism will be presented with a comparison with modernism, and three postmodernist features will be analyzed: indeterminacy, multi-participation and meta-fiction. then based on this context, the central argument of this project will be put forward. the third chapter is the detailed postmodernist interpretation of the narrative arts in daniel martin: indeterminacy in narrative voice, multi-participation in narrative structure and daniel martin as a meta-fiction. thus it lays a foundation for the analysis in the following chapter. compared with the theme “lost self” in the french lieutenant’s woman, the fourth chapter is the further analysis of function of these narrative strategies and its service to the manifestation of daniel martin’s theme — mature self-knowledge quest. 

keywords　 narrative arts; self-knowledge quest; postmodernism.