Narrative features
narrative: story vs. discourse (fabula vs. sjuzhet); plot; episodes; conflict; rising action; catastrophe, denoument; frame stories
narrator: first person; third person; participant narrator (involved vs. detached, or onlooker); omniscient narrator; limited omniscient narrator; telling vs. showing; frame narrations; narratee (who story is being told to, or for); implied author (e.g., beyond limitations of narrator)
point of view, or focalization: internal, external; realism, irony
characters: traits, attributes, motives; role: protagonist, antagonist, etc.; consciousness
discourse: direct (quoted speech), indirect (reported speech); free indirect discourse (FID; third person blend of narrator with character, not quoted)
time: real time; telescoped time (or, scene vs. summary); foreshadowing, flashback; iterative vs. singulative events
setting: spatio-temporal aspects; particular vs. general; mood, atmosphere; symbolic function; animacy (landscape in sympathy with story; character-like)
style: defamiliarizing uses of language; evaluative; register (dialect, tone)
culture of protagonist and/or society: ethical, cultural, ideological issues (e.g., hubris)
Note. Some of these terms are still contentious. For further reading here are some of the standard treatments:
Booth, Wayne C. The Rhetoric of Fiction (1961).
Chatman, Seymour. Story and Discourse: Narrative Structure in Fiction and Film (1978).
Rimmon-Kenan, S. Narrative Fiction: Contemporary Poetics (1983).
Toolan, Michael J. Narrative: A Critical Linguistic Introduction (1988).Suggestion for Essay II:
What is your understanding of the text, or passage, you are considering? What evidence in the text supports your view of it? This evidence includes narrative features of one kind or another: e.g., narrator, point of view, use of setting, etc. Having identified such a feature, consider its role more widely in the text – in other passages; and how it contributes to the formal, aesthetic effects of the text.
E.g., Gulliver, on Yahoos being human, p. 1113: conflates animal and human, shows Gulliver’s deficient, limited point of view; reflects on the judgements he makes elsewhere; invites ironic reading.
Heart of Darkness, p. 2363: “There was a pause…” Shift in point of view to frame narrator. Comments on lighting of match; goes out = darkness. Narrator interruptions signal progress of plot, issues / not story (time: see whole page for examples of shifts in time).
Document created October 26th 2008 / updated November 5th 2008