The plot and the narrative structure of The Joy Luck Club s both experimental and complex. It does not follow the Western narrative tradition of beginning with a point in the past and then following the consequences of that point through to the present but wanders across history and across narrators. And yet the overall effect is by the end a coherent one.
In part this coherence arises from the fact that traditional forms of Western narratives are not in fact quite as simple as the above description implies. Narratives often feature different points of view and include flashbacks that break the fictional seamless of the plot. Tans book extends the narrative possibilities of traditional storytelling by including every recognized device and using most of them several times, but the fundamental elements that she is using are generally known to the reader, which makes it easier for us to follow the books structure.
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