Present-tense narration has become a prevalent narrative style in English literature over the past few decades. This narrative style tended to be considered unnatural and odd in narrative theory in the late twentieth century (Cohn, 1999; Fludernik, 1996), since using the present tense to describe events at the story level of narrative was regarded as incongruous with the traditional story-telling convention of ‘live now and tell later’, in which the present tense is generally associated with the narrator’s deictic centre at the level of discourse. In contemporary present-tense narratives, however, the present tense is often employed as a narrative tense that develops the narrative plot-line, making the unmistakable demarcation between story and discourse impossible by means of tense. As a case study, this paper examines the narrative effects of using present-tense narration in Ali Smith’s How to Be Both (2014). It demonstrates how in this novel, the unique handling of the narrative present tense serves to achieve the particular effects of blurring levels between experience and narration as well as past and present. These effects can only be appreciated by reconsidering the relationship between story and discourse and by clarifying the connection between the functions of present-tense narration and the novel’s central theme, being both. Suggesting that the narrative present tense has varied functions in this novel, such as figural and retrospective, this paper illustrates that the diverse usage of the narrative present tense adds to the unclear distinction between narrative levels.

在过去的几十年里，现在时叙事已经成为英语文学中流行的一种叙事方式。这种叙事风格在 20 世纪后期的叙事理论中往往被认为是不自然和奇怪的（Cohn，1999；Fludernik，1996），因为在叙事的故事层面使用现在时来描述事件被认为与传统故事不协调-“现在生活，以后再说”的讲述惯例，其中现在时通常与叙述者在话语层面的指示中心相关联。然而，在当代的现在时叙事中，现在时经常被用作发展叙事情节的叙事时态，使故事和故事之间的界限明确无误。用时态不可能的话语。作为一个案例研究，本文考察了在 Ali Smith 的《How to Be Both 》 （2014 年）中使用现在时叙事的叙事效果。它展示了在这部小说中，对叙事现在时的独特处理如何实现了经验与叙事以及过去与现在之间的层次模糊的特殊效果。只有重新思考故事与话语的关系，明确现在时叙事的功能与小说的中心主题之间的联系，才能理解这些效果。. 建议叙事现在时在这部小说中具有多种功能，如比喻和回顾，说明叙事现在时的多样化使用增加了叙事层次之间的不明确区分。