NARRATIVE TECHNIQUES AND CHARACTERISATION IN KATHERINE MANSFIELD‘’S ‘“A CUP OF TEA‘”

Abstract

Katherine Mansfield, a pioneer modernist short story writer, wrote many interesting short stories in her short life which show psychological working of the human mind. Her most famous collection is “The garden Party and Other Stories”. A number of her stories such as “Bliss”, “The Fly”, “Miss Brill”, “The Doll’s House” and “The Dove’s Nest” are very popular among readers all over the world. She is an amazing storyteller who demonstrates a mastery over the craft of story writing. The purpose of the present paper is to study her famous and much-anthologized story “A Cup of Tea” so as to bring out the brilliant use of narrative techniques to delineate the protagonist’s character. A close study of the short story shows that the protagonist is not really like what she wants others to think of her as. Mansfield achieves this effect by cleverly controlling the narration of the story and effectively using point of view, characters, dialogues, themes, indeterminacies, and gaps to get the desired result. In conclusion it can be said that by making clever use of narrative strategies, Mansfield succeeds in showing the real face of the protagonist without ever directly mentioning it.