Narratology: A Guide to the Theory of Narrative (continued)
Manfred Jahn

N2.3.1. As is shown in the following graphic, literary narrative communication involves the interplay of at least three communicative levels. Each level of communication comes with its own set of addressers and addressees (also 'senders' and 'receivers').

This model distinguishes between the levels of action, fictional mediation, and nonfictional communication, and establishes useful points of reference for key terms like author, reader, narrator, and narratee/addressee.

For example, on the level of nonfictional (or 'real') communication, the author of the short story "The Fishing-Boat Picture" is Alan Sillitoe, and any reader of this text is situated on the same level of communication. Since author and reader do not communicate in the text itself, their level of communication is an 'extratextual' one. However, there are also two 'intratextual' levels of communication. One is the level of narrative mediation (or 'narrative discourse'), where a fictional first-person narrator named Harry tells the fishing-boat picture story to an unnamed addressee or 'narratee' (see N9 for an argument that Harry is his own narratee). Finally, on the level of action, Harry and his wife Kathy are the major communicating characters of the story. We call this latter level the 'level of action' because speech acts (Austin 1962, Searle 1974) are not categorically different from other acts.

• authorial audience The audience of real readers addressed by the author.

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• narrative audience The fictional audience addressed by the narrator. The term covers both explicitly specified (named) addressees as well as the wider set of unspecified, implied, or hypothetical addressees. Kearns (1999), however, makes the sensible suggestion to reserve the term 'narratee' for explicitly mentioned addressees.

• A person is a real-life person; anyone occupying a place on the level of nonfictional communication. Hence, authors and readers are persons.

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• A character is not a real-life person but only a "paper being" (Barthes 1975 [1966]), a being created by an author and existing only within a fictional text, either on the level of action or on the level of fictional mediation. Example: the character Harry in Sillitoe's "The Fishing Boat Picture".

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• The term figure is often simply used as a variation of 'character'; however, some theorists reserve it for referring to the narrator. Hence Harry, in Sillitoe's story, is a 'narrator figure'.

N2.4. Narrative Levels

• A matrix narrative is a narrative containing an 'embedded' or 'hyponarrative'. The term 'matrix' derives from the Latin word mater (mother, womb) and refers to "something within which something else originates" (Webster's Collegiate Dictionary). In linguistics, a 'matrix sentence' is one that embeds a subordinate sentence. Ordinarily, both the transition to a hyponarrative, its termination and the return to the matrix narrative are explicitly signaled in a text; occasionally, however, a text closes on a hyponarrative without explicitly picking up (returning) to the matrix narrative (example in subgraphic [c] below). One could call this a dangling matrix narrative. The systematic opposite to this would be an uninitialized hyponarrative (example?).

• A first-degree narrative is a narrative that is not embedded in any other narrative; a second-degree narrative is a narrative that is embedded in a first-degree narrative; a third-degree narrative is one that is embedded in a second-degree narrative, etc.

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• A first-degree narrator, by analogy, is the narrator of a first-degree narrative, a second-degree narrator is the narrator of a second-degree narrative, etc., in exact correspondence.

See Genette (1980 [1972]: 228-234; 1988 [1983]: chapter 14) [extradiegetic, diegetic, intradiegetic, metadiegetic]; Bal (1981: 48-50) [on 'hypo-' vs. 'meta-']; Lanser (1981); Rimmon-Kenan (1983: 91-94) ['graded' narrators and narratives]; Duyfhuizen 1992; O'Neill (1994: ch. 3); Nelles (1997: ch. 5).

In example (b), A is a first-degree narrative, B1 and B2 are second-degree narratives, and C is a third-degree narrative (Question: which ones of these are matrix narratives?). Finally, example (c) illustrates the embedding structure of Henry James's The Turn of the Screw. James's novel ends on the conclusion of a third-degree narrative (the Governess's tale) without explicitly closing its two superordinate matrix narratives.

N2.4.4. As an exercise, work out the following problems. Some of them are quite tricky; use simple Chinese-boxes models to argue your answers.

2. Can a matrix narrative be a hyponarrative?

3. Must a first-degree narrative be a matrix narrative?

4. Can a text have more than one first-degree narratives?

N2.4.5. Comment. The foregoing account makes short shrift of a host of rather unhappy terms that haunt the narratological literature, including the term 'frame narrative' itself (does it refer to a narrative that has a frame or one that is or acts as a frame?). With reference to graphic (a) in N2.4.3, above, Genette calls the narrator of A an 'extradiegetic narrator' whose narrative constitutes a 'diegetic' level, while B is a 'metadiegetic narrative' told by an 'intradiegetic' (or, confusingly, 'diegetic') narrator. On the next level of embedding, one would get a meta-metadiegetic narrative told by an intra-intradiegetic narrator. Against this, Bal (1981a: 43) and Rimmon-Kenan (1983: 91-93) have argued that hypo- (from Greek 'under') is a more adequate prefix than meta- (from Greek 'on, between, with') to refer to what are, at least technically (though not necessarily functionally), subordinate narratives. Oddly, however, in their system, B (in graphic [a]) is a 'hyponarrative' told by a 'diegetic narrator', and if there were an additional level, Bal and Rimmon-Kenan would be happy to have a 'hypo-hyponarrative' told by a 'hypodiegetic narrator', and so on. Although the hypo- concept is a useful one, correlating hypodiegetic narrators with hypo-hyponarratives is both awkward and counterintuitive. More drawbacks of the nomenclature become apparent when one tries to tackle the problems set in N2.4.4.

• actional integration: the hyponarrative serves as an important element in the plot of the matrix narrative. For instance, Scheherazade's stories keep the Sultan from killing her. Indeed, in the end, he marries her because she is such an excellent story-teller. Or think of a surprise witness in a crime or courtroom novel whose tale solves the case.

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• exposition: the hyponarrative provides information about events that lie outside the primary action line of the matrix narrative (specifically, events that occurred in the past).
• distraction: "So tell us a story while we're waiting for the rain to stop" (Genette 1988 [1983]: 93).

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• obstruction/retardation: the hyponarrative momentarily suspends the continuation of the matrix narrative, often creating an effect of heightened suspense.
• analogy: the hyponarrative corroborates or contradicts a story line of the matrix narrative ("You are not the only person ever deceived by a faithless lover; let me tell you about [...]") (Barth 1984: 232).

• mise en abyme The infinite loop created when a hyponarrative embeds its matrix narrative. "It can be described as the equivalent of something like Matisse's famous painting of a room in which a miniature version of the same paintings hangs on one of the walls. [...] A famous example from Gide's work is The Counterfeiters (1949) where a character is engaged in writing a novel similar to the novel in which he appears" (Rimmon-Kenan 1983: 93).

It was a dark and stormy night. The band of robbers huddled together around the fire. When he had finished eating, the first bandit said, "Let me tell you a story. It was a dark and stormy night and a band of robbers huddled together around the fire. When he had finished eating, the first bandit said: 'Let me tell you a story. It was a dark an stormy night and . . .'"

N3. Narration, Focalization, and Narrative Situations

The term 'voice' metaphorically invokes one of the major grammatical categories of verb forms -- tense, mood, and voice (Genette 1980: 213). In terms of voice, a verb is either 'active' or 'passive'. In a more general definition, voice indicates "the relation of the subject of the verb to the action which the verb expresses (Webster's Collegiate). In narratology, the basic voice question is "Who speaks?" (= who narrates this?). In the present account, voice is also understood as a characteristic vocal or tonal quality projected from a text.

• A narrator is the speaker or 'voice' of the narrative discourse (Genette 1980 [1972]: 186). He or she is the agent who establishes communicative contact with an addressee (the 'narratee'), who manages the exposition, who decides what is to be told, how it is to be told (especially, from what point of view, and in what sequence), and what is to be left out. If necessary, the narrator will defend the 'tellability' (N1.5) of the story (Labov 1972) and comment on its lesson, purpose, or message.

• Lanser's rule In the absence of any text-internal clues as to the narrator's sex, use the pronoun appropriate to the author's sex; i.e., assume that the narrator is male if the author is male, and that the narrator is female if the author is female, respectively. (Lanser 1981: 166-68; Lanser 1992: ch. 1; Lanser 1995).

N3.1.4. Depending on how the presence of a narrator is signaled in the text, one distinguishes between 'overt' and 'covert' narrators:

• An overt narrator is one who refers to him/herself in the first person ("I", "we" etc.), one who directly or indirectly addresses the narratee, one who offers reader-friendly exposition whenever it is needed (using the 'conative' or 'appellative' discourse function), one who exhibits a 'discoursal stance' or 'slant' toward characters and events, especially in his/her use of rhetorical figures, imagery, evaluative phrases and emotive or subjective expressions ('expressive function'), one who 'intrudes' into the story in order to pass philosophical or metanarrative comments, one who has a distinctive voice.

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• A covert narrator, in contrast, is one who exhibits none of the features of overtness listed above: specifically, s/he is one who neither refers to him- or herself nor addresses any narratees, one who has a more or less neutral (nondistinctive) voice and style, one who is sexually indeterminate, one who shows no 'conative solicitude' whatsoever, one who does not provide exposition even when it is urgently needed, one who does not intrude or interfere, one who lets the story events unfold in their natural sequence and tempo ("lets the story tell itself", as is frequently, though not uncontroversially, said [Lubbock 1957: 62; qtd Genette 1988: 45]); in short, one whose discourse fulfills no obvious conative, phatic, appellative, or expressive functions. Covert narration can be most easily achieved by letting the action be seen through the eyes of an internal focalizer (N3.2.2).

Needless to mention, overtness and covertness are relative terms, that is, narrators can be more or less overt, and more or less covert. Usually, however, overtness and covertness vary in inverse proportion such that the presence of one is an indication of the absence of the other. In analysis, it is always a good idea to look out for typical signals (or absences) of narratorial overtness or functionality.

• In a homodiegetic narrative, the story is told by a (homodiegetic) narrator who is present as a character in the story. The prefix 'homo-' points to the fact that the individual who acts as a narrator is also a character on the level of action. A special case of homodiegetic narration is autodiegetic narration, in which the narrator is the protagonist of his/her story.

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• In a heterodiegetic narrative, the story is told by a (heterodiegetic) narrator who is not present as a character in the story. The prefix 'hetero-' alludes to the 'different nature' of the narrator's world as compared to the world of the action.

• a text is homodiegetic if among its story-related action sentences there are some that contain first-person pronouns (I did this; I saw this; this was what happened to me), indicating that the narrator was at least a witness to the action;

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• a text is heterodiegetic if all story-related action sentences are third-person sentences (She did this, this was what happened to him).

N3.1.6. In order to determine the 'relation' type of a narrative or a narrator, one must check for the presence or absence of an 'experiencing I' in the story's plain action sentences, i.e., sentences which present an event involving the characters in the story. Note well, however, that narrative texts make use of many types of sentences which are not plain action sentences -- descriptions, quotations, comments, etc. (Cp. N1.11, N5.5.5.)

• textual or intratextual voices are those of the narrator (= the text's 'narrative voice') and the characters; whereas

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• the extratextual voice is that of the author. One normally considers the author's voice in two scenarios only: (a) when one has reason to believe that it is more or less identical to that of the narrator (as is usually the case in authorial narration) (aptly named, as one can see), or (b), conversely, when the author's and the narrator's voices are likely to be significantly different -- in other words, when one assumes that the author intentionally uses a narrative voice distinct from his or her own.

N3.1.9. According to Bakhtin, there are two basic voice effects that can characterize a narrative text:

• monologism The effect created when all voices sound more or less the same; the principle underlying a 'monologic' text.

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• dialogism The effect created when a text contains a diversity of authorial, narratorial, and characterial voices creating significant contrasts and tensions. The result is a polyphonic or dialogic text.

N3.1.10. Not surprisingly, most theorists and interpreters (including Bakhtin himself) consider the dialogic text the more sophisticated, interesting and challenging form. There are two additional Bakhtinian terms that are frequently mentioned in the context of dialogism and polyphony:

• heteroglossia (literally, 'other-language') The use of language elements inherited or learned from others. The concept stresses the fact that 'our' language is never truly our own, and that no language can be entirely private or idiosyncratic; hence, heteroglossia normally suffuses all discourses.

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• alterity The theme or effect of otherness or strangeness (especially as opposed to what is familiar and to what one considers one's own selfhood and unique identity). Cp. the alterity effect created by the Russian-influenced slang used by the juvenile hooligans in Burgess's A Clockwork Orange.

N3.2. Focalization (mood)

• A focalizer is the agent whose point of view orients the narrative text. A text is anchored on a focalizer's point of view when it presents (and does not transcend) the focalizer's thoughts, reflections and knowledge, his/her actual and imaginary perceptions, as well as his/her cultural and ideological orientation. While Genette and Chatman prefer to restrict focalization to 'focal characters' only, most narratologists today follow Bal's and Rimmon-Kenan's proposal that a focalizer can be either 'external' (a narrator) or 'internal' (a character). External focalizers are also called 'narrator-focalizers'; internal focalizers are variously termed 'focal characters', 'character-focalizers', 'reflectors', or 'filter characters'.

• fixed focalization The presentation of narrative facts and events from the constant point of view of a single focalizer. The standard example is Joyce's Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.

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• variable focalization The presentation of different episodes of the story as seen through the eyes of several focalizers. For example, in Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway, the narrative's events are seen through the eyes of Clarissa Dalloway, Mr. Dalloway, Peter Walsh, Septimus Warren Smith, Rezia Smith, and many other internal focalizers.

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• multiple focalization A technique of presenting an episode repeatedly, each time seen through the eyes of a different (internal) focalizer. Typically, what is demonstrated by this technique is that different people tend to perceive or interpret the same event in radically different fashion. Texts that are told by more than one narrator (such as epistolary novels) create multiple focalization based on external focalizers (example: Fowles, The Collector). See Collier (1992) for a discussion of multiple internal focalization in Patrick White's The Solid Mandala.

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• collective focalization Focalization through either plural narrators ('we narrative') or a group of characters ('collective reflectors'). Stanzel (1984: 172); Banfield (1982: 96). Example:

A small crowd meanwhile had gathered at the gates of Buckingham Palace. Listlessly, yet confidently, poor people all of them, they waited; looked at the Palace itself with the flag flying; at Victoria, billowing on her mount, admired the shelves of running water, her geraniums; singled out from the motor cars in the Mall first this one, then that [...]. (Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway)

Both Genette (1988: ch. 17) and Stanzel (1984) use the term narrative situation to refer to more complex arrangements or patterns of narrative features. Genette's system uses the subtypes of voice (narration) and mood (focalization) in order to explore a range of possible combinations; Stanzel is more interested in describing 'ideal-typical' or (as we shall say) prototypical configurations and arranging them on a 'typological circle' (1984: xvi). The following paragraphs will mainly focus on the interpretive implications of Stanzel's model. For an excellent comparative survey of the two approaches, including some proposals for revisions, see Cohn (1981).

• A first-person narrative is told by a narrator who is present as a character in his/her story; it is a story of events s/he has experienced him- or herself, a story of personal experience. The individual who acts as a narrator (narrating I) is also a character (experiencing I) on the level of action (more: N3.3.2).

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• An authorial narrative is told by a narrator who is absent from the story, i.e., does not appear as a character in the story. The authorial narrator tells a story involving other people. An authorial narrator sees the story from an outsider's position, often a position of absolute authority that allows her/him to know everything about the story's world and its characters (more: N3.3.5).

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• A figural narrative presents a story as if seeing it through the eyes of a character (more: N3.3.7).

N3.3.2. Here, in more detail, are the main aspects of first-person narration.

• In first-person narration, the first-person pronoun refers both to the narrator (narrating I or narrating self) and to a character in the story (experiencing I). If the narrator is the main character of the story s/he is an I-as-protagonist; if s/he is one of the minor characters s/he is an I-as-witness. With respect to focalization, a first-person narrative can either be told from the hindsight awareness of the narrating I (typical discoursal attitude: Had I known then what I know now) or from the more limited and naive level of insight of the experiencing I (functioning as an internal focalizer). Epistemologically (knowledge-wise), first-person narrators are restricted to ordinary human limitations (Lanser 1981: 161): they cannot (under ordinary circumstances) narrate the story of their own death, and they can never know for certain what other characters think or thought (the 'other minds' problem).

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• narrative distance The temporal and psychological distance between the narrating I and the experiencing I. Usually, the narrating I is older and wiser than the experiencing I. Example:

Later I learnt, among other things, never to buy cheap raincoats, to punch the dents out of my hat before I put it away, and not to have my clothes match too exactly in shade and colour. But I looked well enough that morning ten years ago [exact specification of temporal distance]; I hadn't then begun to acquire a middle-aged spread and -- whether it sounds sentimental or not -- I had a sort of eagerness and lack of disillusion which more than made up for the coat and hat . . . . [a block characterization of the experiencing I, from the point of view of the narrating I] (Braine, Room at the Top 7)

• A fictional autobiography is an I-as-protagonist (Genette: autodiegetic) narrative in which the first-person narrator tells the story (or an episode) of his/her life. Example: Sillitoe, "The Fishing Boat Picture".

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• A story of initiation is a story about a young person's introduction into a new sphere of society, activity, or experience. Many stories of initiation involve some stage in the transition from childhood and ignorance to adulthood and maturity and climax at a moment of recognition. As Freese (1979) has shown, many stories of initiation also begin with a journey, often they involve a character's first sexual experience or some growing-up ritual or ceremony, which sometimes turns into an ordeal. Occasionally, the protagonist (technically, the 'initiate') can turn to an adult helper, but often enough there is no helper, or the helper turns out to be a fraud, and the whole initiatory experience may become a catastrophic and traumatic failure. (Note that not all initiation stories are necessarily homodiegetic ones. Consider also what it means to say that someone is "uninitiated".) Example: Sherwood Anderson, "I want to Know Why" [note that the story's title already alludes to motif of ignorance]. See also Brooks and Warren (1959).

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• skaz narrative (from Russian skaz, 'speech') A literary form that represents an oral (or 'conversational') story-telling situation in which a speaker tells a story to a present audience. Apart from having a distinctly oral diction and syntax, a skaz-narrator's discourse is also characterized by a high incidence of phatic and appellative elements, signaling the presence of the listening audience. Skaz is closely related (and usefully compared to) the poetic genre of the 'dramatic monologue'. (Not all skaz narratives are necessarily homodiegetic ones, however). See Dolezel (1980: 22); Banfield (1982: 172, 306n 25); Fludernik (1996: 178-179, 394n1). Examples: Mark Twain, Huckleberry Finn, Ring Lardner, "Haircut", Salinger, Catcher in the Rye.

• authorial narration involves telling a story from the point of view of an 'authorial narrator', i.e., somebody who is not, and never was, a character in the story itself. (Note, however, that, like a first-person (Genette: homodiegetic) narrator, an authorial narrator may refer to him- or herself in the first person.) Often, the authorial narrator's status of an outsider makes her/him an authority commanding practically godlike abilities such as omniscience and omnipresence. Many authors allow their authorial narrators to speak directly to their addressees, to comment on action and characters, to engage in philosophical reflection, and to 'interrupt' the course of the action by detailed descriptions (pauses, see N5.5.3). As Friedman puts it, "The prevailing characteristic of omniscience [...] is that the author[ial narrator] is always ready to intervene himself between the reader and the story, and that even when he does set a scene, he will render it as he sees it rather than as his people see it" (1967 [1955]: 124). Example:

• figural narration A figural narrative presents the story's events as seen through the eyes of a third-person 'reflector' character (or internal focalizer or 'figural medium'). The narrative agency of figural narration is a highly covert one; some theorists go so far as to say that figural texts are "narratorless" (Banfield 1982). Stanzel (1984: 141-184, 185-200, 225-236); Stanzel (1964: 17, 39-52). Weldon's "Weekend" is a figural short story: everything -- or almost everything -- is seen through Martha's point of view.

N3.3.8. Note, too, that the foregoing definition assumes that figural narration is realized as a heterodiegetic (third person) text. There is also a slightly more flexible concept of 'reflector-mode narration', however, which allows the inclusion of first-person texts:

• reflector-mode narration A mode of narration in which the story is presented as seen through the eyes of either a third-person or a first-person reflector character (internal focalizer).

• referentless pronoun Many figural stories begin with a third-person pronoun whose referent has not yet been established. This is usually indicative of a narrator's covertness, his/her relinquishing of exposition and conative solicitude. Usually, the pronoun identifies the text's internal focalizer. See also 'familiarizing article', below. Stanzel (1984: 6.3).

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• Similarly, a familiarizing article presents new information (as far as the reader is concerned) in the guise of given information (as far as a story-internal character is concerned). Cf. the incipit of Hemingway's For Whom the Bell Tolls: "He [referentless pronoun, identifying the reflector] lay flat on the [familiarizing article] brown, pine-needled floor of the [another familiarizing article] forest [...]". Bronzwaer (1970); Stanzel (1984: 6.3).

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• slice of life story/novel A short story or novel whose story time (N5.5.2) is restricted to a very brief episode in a character's life, often only a day, a few hours, or even just a single moment. Examples: Joyce, "Eveline", Mansfield, "Miss Brill", Richardson, "The Garden", Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway, Joyce, Ulysses (note that the latter is a 600+ page novel!).

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• epiphany Originally, a Greek term denoting the 'manifestation' or appearance of divine quality or power. The term was appropriated by James Joyce in Stephen Hero (1905) to denote a moment of intense insight, usually occasioned by the perception of a more or less ordinary object or event. The term is closely related to what other authors variously term 'moment of vision' (Conrad, Woolf), 'moment of being' (Woolf, again), or 'glimpse' (Mansfield). According to Beja, "epiphany is a sudden spiritual manifestation, whether from some object, scene, event, or memorable phase of the mind -- the manifestation being out of proportion to the significance or strictly logical relevance of whatever produces it" (Beja 1984: 719). Here is the relevant passage from Joyce's Stephen Hero:

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Stephen as he passed [...] heard the following fragment of colloquy out of which he received an impression keen enough to afflict his sensitiveness very severely:

     The Young Lady -- (drawling discreetly) ...O, yes ... I was ... at the ... cha...pel...

     The Young Gentleman -- (inaudibly) ... I ... (again inaudibly) ... I ...


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     The Young Lady -- (softly) ... O ... but you're ... ve...ry .... wick...ed ...

This triviality made him think of collecting many such moments together in a book of epiphanies. By an epiphany he meant a sudden spiritual manifestation, whether in the vulgarity of speech or of gesture or in a memorable phase of the mind itself. He believed that it was for the man of letters to record these epiphanies with extreme care, seeing that they themselves are the most delicate and evanescent of moments. (qtd Beja 1971: 72-73)

• mirror trick A way (perhaps the only way?) of conveying the physical characteristics of a reflector figure without using overt narratorial description. Example:

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Mr. Hutton came to pause in front of a small oblong mirror. Stooping a little to get a full view of his face, he passed a well-manicured finger over his moustache. It was as curly, as freshly auburn as it had been twenty years ago. His hair still retained its colour, and there was no sign of baldness yet -- only a certain elevation of the brow. "Shakespearean," thought Mr. Hutton, with a smile [...]. (Huxley, "The Gioconda Smile")

N3.3.11. In addition to the three standard narrative situations, we will briefly mention four peripheral categories: we-narratives, you-narratives, simultaneous narration and camera-eye narration.

• we-narrative A form of homodiegetic narrative in which the narrator's experiencing self belongs to a group of collective internal focalizers. Fludernik (1996: ch. 6.1.1); Margolin (1996; 2000).

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We did not say she was crazy then. We believed she had to do that. We remembered all the young men her father had driven away, and we knew that with nothing left, she would have to cling to that which had robbed her, as people will. (Faulkner, "A Rose for Emily")
• you-narrative/second-person narrative A narrative in which the protagonist is referred to in the second person. Functionally, you may refer (a) to the narrator's experiencing Self, (b) to some other character in a homodiegetic world, or (c) to a character in a heterodiegetic world. (Note, we are not talking here of the 'general' "you", meaning 'anyone', nor the "you" that first-person or authorial narrators use for addressing their narratees). You-narratives are special forms of homodiegetic and heterodiegetic narratives. More on this in Booth (1961: 150); Stanzel (1984: ch. 5.1, 7.3); Bonheim (1990: ch. 15); Fludernik (1993b); Style 28.3 (1994; special issue); Fludernik (1996: ch. 6.1.1)

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I persistently imagine you dead. You told me that you loved me years ago. And I said that I, too, was in love with you in those days. An exaggeration. (Alice Munro, "Tell Me Yes or No", qtd Bonheim 1990: 281) [homodiegetic you-narrative]

Claude Ford knew exactly how it was to hunt a brontosaurus. You crawled heedlessly through the grass beneath the willows, through the little primitive flowers with petals as green and brown as a football field, through the beauty-lotion mud. You peered out at the creature sprawling among the reeds, its body as graceful as a sock full of sand. (Brian W. Aldiss, "Poor Little Warrior!") [heterodiegetic you-narrative]


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• simultaneous narration A type of homodiegetic narrative in which the narrator tells a story that unfolds as s/he tells it. The problematic logic of this type of narrative situation demands that the narrator does not know how the story ends, that there can be no objective flashforwards, that all diegetic sentences are in the present tense, and that the narrating and experiencing selves (external and internal focalizers) overlap and merge. Simultaneous narration exhibits a certain resemblance to both journalistic 'on-the-scene reporting' and interior monologue (N8.9). The term was originally coined by Genette (1980 [1972]: 218-19); the current extended definition is Cohn's (1993). Examples: Charlotte Perkins Gilman, "The Yellow Wallpaper" (1892) [a diary-type story]; Beckett, "Text For Nothing: One"; Updike, "Wife-Wooing".

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But in the places where it [the wallpaper] isn't faded and where the sun is just so -- I can see a strange, provoking, formless sort of figure, that seems to skulk about that silly and conspicuous front design.

     There's sister on the stairs! (Gilman, "The Yellow Wallpaper")


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• camera-eye narration The purely external or 'behaviorist' representation of events; a text that reads like a transcription of a recording made by a camera. Originally, the term was appropriated from the introductory paragraph of Christopher Isherwood's Goodbye to Berlin (quoted below); today, the term is more often used as a metaphor of strictly 'neutral' types of heterodiegetic narration. Stanzel (1955: 28) briefly toyed with the notion of a separate category of 'neutral narration' but eventually subsumed this under figural narration; however, 'neutral narrative' is still an active category in Lintvelt's (1981) model, where it is characterized by covert narration, absence of inside views, and the point of view of a stationary camera. The standard example is Hemingway's "The Killers" (see below). Pouillon (1946: ch. 2) [introduction of the concept of outside view (vision du dehors)]; Friedman (1967[1955]: 130-131); Stanzel (1984: ch. 7.3.2); Genette 1980 [1972]: ch. 4; Genette 1988 [1983]: ch. 11 ['external' focalization]; Lintvelt (1981: ch. 3) [neutral narrative]. Examples:

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From my window, the deep solemn massive street. Cellar-shops where the lamps burn all day, under the shadow of top-heavy balconied facades, dirty plaster-frontages embossed with scroll-work and heraldic devices. [...]

     I am a camera with its shutter open, quite passive, recording, not thinking. Recording the man shaving at the window opposite and the woman in the kimono washing her hair. Some day, all this will have to be developed, carefully printed, fixed. (Isherwood, Goodbye to Berlin)


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The door of Henry's lunch-room opened and two men came in. They sat down at the counter.

     "What's yours?" George asked them.

     "I don't know," one of the men said. "What do you want to eat, Al?"


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     "I don't know," said Al. "I don't know what I want to eat."

     Outside it was getting dark. The street-light came on outside the window. The two men at the counter read the menu. Nick Adams watched them. He had been talking to George when they came in. (Hemingway, "The Killers")

N3.3.12. Here come some problem cases, and they are largely due to the fact that a whole novel or a passage of a narrative text may exhibit features of more than one narrative situation, producing borderline cases, transitional passages, and mixed mode narrative situations. The most common phenomenon is that of 'authorial-figural narration'.

• In authorial-figural narration there is both an authorial narrator and a figural medium (Stanzel 1984: 185-186). Examples: (1) Bradbury's "Composition" begins with an authorial exposition but has a middle section which is presented largely through the protagonist's point of view. The story ends with authorial summary and comment. (2) In Henry James's What Maisie Knew, the perceptions of a young heroine with a very limited consciousness are amplified by an overt and intrusive authorial narrator's commentary. (3) A number of short stories in Joyce's Dubliners ("A Painful Case", "The Boarding House") begin with an authorial exposition and then continue as figural narrations.

• Our story opens in the mind of Luther L. (L for LeRoy) Fliegler, who is lying in his bed, not thinking of anything, but just aware of sounds, conscious of his own breathing, and sensitive to his own heartbeats. Lying beside him is his wife, lying on her right side and enjoying her sleep. She has earned her sleep, for it is Christmas morning, strictly speaking, and all the day before she has worked like a dog, cleaning the turkey and baking things, and, until a few hours ago, trimming the tree. (O'Hara, Appointment in Samarra 7)

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•      According to the Buddhist belief, those who have done evil in their lives will spend the next incarnation in the shape of a rat, a frog or some other low animal. U Po Kyin was a good Buddhist and intended to provide against this danger. He would devote his closing years to good works, which would pile up enough merit to outweigh the rest of his life. Probably his good works would take the form of building pagodas. Four pagodas, five, six, seven -- the priests would tell him how many -- with carved stonework, gilt umbrellas, and little bells that tinkled in the wind, every tinkle a prayer. And he would return to the earth in male human shape -- for a woman ranks at about the same level as a rat or a frog -- or at best some dignified beast such as an elephant.

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     All these thoughts flowed through U Po Kyin's mind swiftly and for the most part in pictures. His brain, though cunning, was quite barbaric, and it never worked except for some definite end; mere meditation was beyond him. (Orwell, Burmese Days)

N3.3.14. A decidedly rarer type of mixed-mode narration is first-person/third-person narration as exemplified by, for instance, Thomas Mann's Doktor Faustus, Sterne's Tristram Shandy, Donleavy's The Beastly Beatitudes of Balthazar B, John Barth's "Ambrose His Mark", and Fay Weldon's The Heart of the Country. In Jan Philipp Reemtsma's autobiographical story Im Keller, the episodes in the cellar (where the author was held hostage for 33 days) are narrated in the third person. As Reemtsma puts it, "there is no I-continuity that leads from my writing desk into that cellar" (p. 46).

• alteration A (usually, temporary) shift into a mode of presentation which does not conform to the standard expectations associated with the current narrative situation. Genette specifically invokes the analogy of a musical composition which momentarily becomes dissonant or changes its tonality (Genette 1980: 197).

• paralepsis An infraction caused by saying too much; a narrator assuming a competence he/she does not properly have; typically, a first-person narrator (or a historiographer) narrating what somebody else thought (Genette's 1980: 208 example is Marcel's narration of Bergotte's dying thoughts), or what happened when he/she was not present (illicit assumption of authorial competence).

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• paralipsis An infraction caused by omitting crucial information; saying too little; typically, an authorial narrator pretending "not to know" what happened in her/his characters' minds, or what went on at the same time in another place, or distortively censoring a character's thought, or generally pretending to be restricted to ordinary human limitations. (To remember this term, think of the rhetorical figure of ellipsis, omission.)

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She sat at the window watching the evening invade the avenue. Her head was leaned against the window curtains and in her nostrils was the odour of dusty cretonne. She was tired.

"It would have an absolutely jarring effect on the reader", Fillmore continues, "[...] if the last line of the paragraph were to read 'She was probably tired'" (Fillmore 1981: 160). See also: Genette (1980: 194-197); Edmiston (1991) [paralepsis/paralipsis put to excellent analytical use]; Jahn (1997) [narrative situations as cognitive frames; notion of replacement frames]; Lejeune (1989), Cohn (1999: ch. 2) [both on narrator-narratee contracts].

N4. Action, story analysis, tellability

• action A sequence of acts and events; the sum of events constituting a 'story line' on a narrative's level of action. An 'action unit' or 'narreme' (Dorfman 1969) is a distinct point (or small segment) on the story line.

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When my first pay-night came I called for her and asked: "What about a walk up Snakey Wood?" (Sillitoe, "The Fishing-Boat Picture" 135) [The beginning of the primary story line is here signaled by the first scenically and singulatively presented event.]

N4.2. What should count as a "minimal sequence of events"? If one permits the limit case of one event then "the quick brown fox jumped over the lazy cow" can count as a possible minimal narrative, as do "the king died", "Pierre has come" and "I walk" (Genette 1988: 18-20). Another example used by Genette, "Marcel becomes a writer" wittily condenses Proust's 2000-page novel A la recherche du temps perdu into a single narrative sentence. Here are some additional examples of minimal narratives:

• Joan ate an egg and Peter drank a glass of milk, then they went to the theater. (Prince 1982: 76)

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• The king died and then the queen died of grief. (Forster)
• Jack and Jill / Went up the hill / To fetch a pail of water; Jack fell down / And broke his crown, / And Jill came tumbling after. (Everyman's Book of Nonsense 158))

N4.3. None of the foregoing examples can boast of a high degree of tellability (Labov 1972; Ryan 1991: ch. 8). Normally, a story is required to have a point, to teach a lesson, to present an interesting experience (also called 'experientiality', Fludernik 1996), and to arrange its episodes in an interesting progression. Sketching his project, Branigan says:

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I wish to examine how we come to know that something is a narrative and how a narrative is able to make intelligible our experiences and feelings. I will argue that it is more than a way of classifying texts: narrative is a perceptual activity that organizes data into a special pattern which represents and explains experience. (Branigan 1992: 3)

[Narrative] deals in human or human-like intention and action and the vicissitudes and consequences that mark their course. It strives to put its timeless miracles into the particulars of experience, and to locate the experience in time and place. [...] [S]tory must construct two landscapes simultaneously. One is the landscape of action, where the constituents are [...] agent, intention or goal, situation, instrument [...]. The other landscape is the landscape of consciousness: what those involved in the action know, think, or feel, or do not know, think or feel. [...] Indeed, it is an invention of modern novelists and playwrights to create a world made up entirely of the psychic realities of the protagonists, leaving knowledge of the "real" world in the realm of the implicit. (1986: 13-14)

There are two kinds of identification which a reader may make with characters in a story. First, he may recognize in the story-character a more or less realistic representation of himself. (For example, the story-character is shown misunderstood by his parents, while the reader, because of the vividness of the narrative, recognizes his own experiences in those of the story-character.) Secondly, the reader may find, by identifying himself with the story-character, the fulfillment of his own desires. (For example, the reader may be poor, not very handsome, and not popular with girls, but he may find symbolic satisfaction in identifying himself with a story-character who is represented as rich, handsome, and madly sought after by hundreds of beautiful women.) It is not easy to draw hard-and-fast lines between these two kinds of identification, but basically the former kind (which we may call "identification by self-recognition") rests upon the similarity of the reader's experiences with those of the story-character, while the latter kind ( "identification for wish-fulfillment" ) rests upon the dissimilarity between the reader's dull life and the story-character's interesting life. Many (perhaps most) stories engage (or seek to engage) the reader's identification by both means. (Hayakawa 1964: 141)

• episode A group of action units consisting of three parts: an exposition, a complication, and a resolution (Kintsch 1976). Hence a story can be described both as a sequence of action units (as above) and as a sequence of episodes.

Regarding his corpus of fairy tales, Bremond adds that "the cycle starts from a state of deficiency or a satisfactory state" and "ends usually with the establishment of a satisfactory state" (1970: 251), i.e., the "they lived happily ever after" formula. For a more detailed account of Freytag's model look up D7.5; for the present, however, Barth's explication is quite sufficient:

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AB represents the exposition, B the introduction of conflict, BC the 'rising action', complication, or development of the conflict, C the climax, or turn of the action, CD the denouement, or resolution of the conflict. While there is no reason to regard this pattern as an absolute necessity, like many other conventions it became conventional because great numbers of people over many years learned by trial and error that it was effective [...]. (Barth 1968: 99)

• Boy meets girl; boy loses girl; boy gets girl. (Benson's law of romantic comedy, cp. D7.9)

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• A community is threatened by a dragon. A youthful hero rides out to find it. He meets the dragon in the woods and kills it. Returning home, he is richly rewarded. [The action frame of the dragon-slayer myth; for a fully realized version see Lewis Carroll's "Jabberwocky".]
• A young woman lives in stifling domestic circumstances. She falls in love with a sailor who promises her a new life in a far-away country. But, torn between love to her friend and duty to her family, she is unable to escape. [A synopsis of Joyce's "Eveline".]

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• After the 4077th supply of hydrocortisone is hijacked by black marketeers, Hawkeye and Trapper concoct a deal with a local black marketeer (Jack Soo) to get some more. The catch: Henry's antique oak desk, which is whisked away by chopper as Henry watches in disbelief. [Unedited summary of M*A*S*H episode 2, "To Market, To Market", broadcast September 24, 1972; quoted from quoted from http://www.faqs.org/faqs/tv/mash/guide/ . Note the type and amount of background information that needs to be supplied here to make this comprehensible to the uninitiated.]

• story The chronological sequence of events. Story analysis examines the chronological scale and coherence of the action sequence. The basic question concerning story structure is "What happens next?" (Forster's example: "The king died, and then the queen died"). Note that a narrative's discourse does not have to present the story in purely chronological fashion: a narrative may easily begin with action unit M, execute a flashback to G, jump forward to P, etc. (See flashforwards, flashbacks, anachrony in section 5.2, below).

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• plot The logical and causal structure of a story. The basic question concerning plot structure is "Why does this happen?" (Forster's example: "The king died, and then the queen died of grief"). Texts can have widely differing degrees of plot connectivity: some are tightly and linearly plotted (typically, every action unit is the causal consequence of something that happened before -- the characters want to fulfill dreams, go on a quest, realize plans, overcome problems, pass tests etc.); others make use of 'mosaic plots' (Scanlan 1988: ch. 7) whose causal coherence is not immediately obvious; others again are loosely plotted, episodic, accident-driven, and possibly avoid plotting altogether. To illustrate, fairy tales are usually linearly and tightly plotted following the pattern A does X because B has done (or is) Y. The Queen is jealous because Snow-White has become more beautiful than she is. So she orders a huntsman to kill her. But the huntsman does not do it because he takes pity on Snow-White (because she's so beautiful). . . etc. Forster (1976 [1927]); Bremond (1970); Rimmon-Kenan (1983: ch. 1); Pavel (1985a); Ryan (1991); Gutenberg (2000).

• incipit The opening passage of a text. Bonheim (1982: ch. 6).
• point of attack The event chosen to begin the primary action line. There are three main options: (1) a story beginning ab ovo typically begins with the birth of the protagonist and a state of equilibrium or non-conflict; (2) for a beginning in medias res, the point of attack is set close to the climax of the action; (3) for a beginning in ultimas res, the point of attack occurs after the climax and near the end. Modern short stories typically begin in medias res. Schwarze (1989: 161) [on the Latin terms].

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• closure The type of conclusion that ends a text. Formally, narratives often conclude with an epilogue or a scene (usually, a final dialogue). In traditional, plot-oriented texts, the main conflict is usually resolved by marriage, death, or some other aesthetically or morally satisfactory outcome producing a state of equilibrium. Many modern texts, however, lack closure; they may be open-ended (Weldon, "Weekend"), simply stop (Hemingway, "The Killers"), conclude enigmatically (Fowles, "The Enigma") or ambiguously (Wells, "The Country of the Blind"), or even offer alternative endings (Bradbury, "Composition"). Kermode (1965); Bremond (1970); Torgovnick (1981); Bonheim (1982: chapters 7-8).

N5. Tense, Time, and Narrative Modes

N5.1.1. There are two major narrative tenses: the narrative past and the narrative present. Normally, a text's use of tenses relates to and depends on the current point in time of the narrator's speech act. Naturally, the tense used in a character's discourse depends on the current point in time in the story's action. Hence,

• discourse-NOW The current point in time in discourse time (N5.5.2): the narrator's NOW.

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• story-NOW The current point in time in story time (N5.5.2); usually, a character's NOW.

N5.1.2. Here is how one determines a text's narrative tense:

• Pick a sentence presenting action and identify the tense of its full verb. If this is the past tense or a related tense like the past progressive, the narrative tense is the narrative past. If it is the present, the narrative tense is the narrative present (surprise). The narrative tense usually remains constant over long stretches or all of a text. Stanzel (1984: 23-28); Cohn (1993: 21).

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"James," said [= narrative past] Aunt Emily harshly, "you must run off to bed . . . . Mother needs perfect quiet." (Dos Passos, Manhattan Transfer)

Shaking from head to foot, the man [...] at length rises [= narrative present], supports his trembling frame upon his arms, and looks around. (Dickens, Edwin Drood)


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• tense switch / tense shift A switch from the current narrative tense to the complementary narrative tense (i.e., narrative past to narrative present and vice versa). A tense switch is normally used to produce an effect of intensification or distancing (moving into/out of focus), change of perspective, etc.

• narrative present One of the two narrative tenses (see above). The narrative present foregrounds the story-NOW and backgrounds the discourse-NOW.
• historical present A local present tense in a past tense context, usually producing an effect of immediacy or signaling a climax (perhaps comparable to the use of slow motion in film?).

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• The gnomic present/generic present presents (seemingly) common truths or statements claiming general validity, often in the form of a proverb. See Chatman (1978: 82); Stanzel (1984: 108); Wales (1989: 219, 375). Examples:

It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife. [Ironic gnomic statement used at the beginning of Austen's Pride and Prejudice.]


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Tizzie Dunn was dead, too, and the Waters had gone back to England. Everything changes [gnomic present]. Now she was going to go away like the others, to leave her home. (Joyce, "Eveline" 29)
• synoptic present Use of the present tense in a chapter summary, the title of a chapter, etc. "Mr. Pickwick journeys to Ipswich and meets with a romantic adventure" (qtd. Stanzel 1982: 42).

• retrospective narration produces a past-tense narrative whose events and action units have all happened in the past.

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• concurrent narration produces a present-tense narrative whose action takes place at the same time as it is recounted (discourse-NOW and story-NOW are identical). Typical case: diaries, on-the-scene reporting; see simultaneous narration, N3.3.11, for examples.
• prospective narration produces a future-tense narrative which recounts events that have not yet occurred. Example: prophetic narrative.