Narration is the use of a written or spoken commentary to convey a story to an audience.[1] Narration is conveyed by a narrator: a specific person, or unspecified literary voice, developed by the creator of the story to deliver information to the audience, particularly about the plot: the series of events. Narration is a required element of all written stories (novels, short stories, poems, memoirs, etc.), presenting the story in its entirety. It is optional in most other storytelling formats, such as films, plays, television shows and video games, in which the story can be conveyed through other means, like dialogue between characters or visual action.
The narrative mode, which is sometimes also used as synonym for narrative technique, encompasses the set of choices through which the creator of the story develops their narrator and narration:
Narrative point of view, perspective, or voice: the choice of grammatical person used by the narrator to establish whether or not the narrator and the audience are participants in the story; also, this includes the scope of the information or knowledge that the narrator presents
Narrative tense: the choice of either the past or present grammatical tense to establish either the prior completion or current immediacy of the plot
Narrative technique: any of the various other methods chosen to help narrate a story, such as establishing the story's setting (location in time and space), developing characters, exploring themes (main ideas or topics), structuring the plot, intentionally expressing certain details but not others, following or subverting genre norms, employing certain linguistic styles and using various other storytelling devices.
Thus, narration includes both who tells the story and how the story is told (for example, by using stream of consciousness or unreliable narration). The narrator may be anonymous and unspecified, or a character appearing and participating within their own story (whether fictitious or factual), or the author themself as a character. The narrator may merely relate the story to the audience without being involved in the plot and may have varied awareness of characters' thoughts and distant events. Some stories have multiple narrators to illustrate the storylines of various characters at various times, creating a story with a complex perspective.
Point of view
An ongoing debate has persisted regarding the nature of narrative point of view. A variety of different theoretical approaches have sought to define point of view in terms of person, perspective, voice, consciousness and focus.[2] Narrative perspective is the position and character of the storyteller, in relation to the narrative itself.[3] There is, for instance, a common distinction between first-person and third-person narrative, which Gérard Genette refers to as intradiegetic and extradiegetic narrative, respectively.[4]
Literary theory
The Russian semiotician Boris Uspenskij identifies five planes on which point of view is expressed in a narrative: spatial, temporal, psychological, phraseological and ideological.[5] The American literary critic Susan Sniader Lanser also develops these categories.[6]
The psychological point of view focuses on the characters' behaviors. Lanser concludes that this is "an extremely complex aspect of point of view, for it encompasses the broad question of the narrator's distance or affinity to each character and event…represented in the text".[7]
The ideological point of view is not only "the most basic aspect of point of view" but also the "least accessible to formalization, for its analysis relies to a degree, on intuitive understanding".[8] This aspect of the point of view focuses on the norms, values, beliefs and Weltanschauung (worldview) of the narrator or a character. The ideological point of view may be stated outright—what Lanser calls "explicit ideology"—or it may be embedded at "deep-structural" levels of the text and not easily identified.[9]
A first-person point of view reveals the story through an openly self-referential and participating narrator. First person creates a close relationship between the narrator and reader, by referring to the viewpoint character with first person pronouns like I and me (as well as we and us, whenever the narrator is part of a larger group).[10]
The second-person point of view is a point of view similar to first-person in its possibilities of unreliability. The narrator recounts their own experience but adds distance (often ironic) through the use of the second-person pronoun you. This is not a direct address to any given reader even if it purports to be, such as in the metafictional If on a winter's night a traveler by Italo Calvino. Other notable examples of second-person include the novel Bright Lights, Big City by Jay McInerney, the short fiction of Lorrie Moore and Junot Díaz, the short story The Egg by Andy Weir and Second Thoughts by Michel Butor. Sections of N. K. Jemisin's The Fifth Season and its sequels are also narrated in the second person.
You are not the kind of guy who would be at a place like this at this time of the morning. But here you are, and you cannot say that the terrain is entirely unfamiliar, although the details are fuzzy.
Mohsin Hamid's The Reluctant Fundamentalist and Gamebooks, including the American Choose Your Own Adventure and British Fighting Fantasy series (the two largest examples of the genre), are not true second-person narratives, because there is an implicit narrator (in the case of the novel) or writer (in the case of the series) addressing an audience. This device of the addressed reader is a near-ubiquitous feature of the game-related medium, regardless of the wide differences in target reading ages and role-playing game system complexity. Similarly, text-based interactive fiction, such as Colossal Cave Adventure and Zork, conventionally has descriptions that address the user, telling the character what they are seeing and doing. This practice is also encountered occasionally in text-based segments of graphical games, such as those from Spiderweb Software, which make ample use of pop-up text boxes with character and location descriptions. Most of Charles Stross's novel Halting State is written in second person as an allusion to this style.[11][12]
Third-person
"Third-person perspective" redirects here. For the graphical perspective in video games, see Third-person view.
In the third-person narrative mode, the narration refers to all characters with third person pronouns like he, she, or they, and never first- or second-person pronouns.[13]
Omniscient or limited
Omniscient point of view is presented by a narrator with an overarching perspective, seeing and knowing everything that happens within the world of the story, including what each of the characters is thinking and feeling. The inclusion of an omniscient narrator is typical in nineteenth-century fiction including works by Charles Dickens, Leo Tolstoy and George Eliot.[14]
Examples of Limited or close third-person point of view, confined to one character's perspective, include J.M. Coetzee's Disgrace.[16]
Subjective or objective
Subjective point of view is when the narrator conveys the thoughts, feelings and opinions of one or more characters.[17]Objective point of view employs a narrator who tells a story without describing any character's thoughts, opinions, or feelings; instead, it gives an objective, unbiased point of view.[17]
While the tendency for novels (or other narrative works) is to adopt a single point of view throughout the entire novel, some authors have utilized other points of view that, for example, alternate between different first-person narrators or alternate between a first- and a third-person narrative mode. The ten books of the Pendragon adventure series, by D. J. MacHale, switch back and forth between a first-person perspective (handwritten journal entries) of the main character along his journey as well as a disembodied third-person perspective focused on his friends back home.[18]
In Indigenous American communities, narratives and storytelling are often told by a number of elders in the community. In this way, the stories are never static because they are shaped by the relationship between narrator and audience. Thus, each individual story may have countless variations. Narrators often incorporate minor changes in the story in order to tailor the story to different audiences.[19]
The use of multiple narratives in a story is not simply a stylistic choice, but rather an interpretive one that offers insight into the development of a larger social identity and the impact that has on the overarching narrative, as explained by Lee Haring.[20]
Haring provides an example from the Arabic folktales of One Thousand and One Nights to illustrate how framing was used to loosely connect each story to the next, where each story was enclosed within the larger narrative. Additionally, Haring draws comparisons between Thousand and One Nights and the oral storytelling observed in parts of rural Ireland, islands of the Southwest Indian Ocean and African cultures such as Madagascar.
"I'll tell you what I'll do," said the smith. "I'll fix your sword for you tomorrow, if you tell me a story while I'm doing it." The speaker was an Irish storyteller in 1935, framing one story in another (O'Sullivan 75, 264). The moment recalls the Thousand and One Nights, where the story of "The Envier and the Envied" is enclosed in the larger story told by the Second Kalandar (Burton 1: 113-39), and many stories are enclosed in others."[20]
Tense
In narrative past tense, the events of the plot occur before the narrator's present.[21] This is by far the most common tense in which stories are expressed. This could be in the narrator's distant past or their immediate past, which for practical purposes is the same as their present. Past tense can be used regardless of whether the setting is in the reader's past, present, or future.
In narratives using present tense, the events of the plot are depicted as occurring in the narrator's current moment of time. A recent example of novels narrated in the present tense are those of the Hunger Games trilogy by Suzanne Collins. Present tense can also be used to narrate events in the reader's past. This is known as "historical present".[22] This tense is more common in spontaneous conversational narratives than in written literature, though it is sometimes used in literature to give a sense of immediacy of the actions. Screenplay action is also written in the present tense.
The future tense is the most rare, portraying the events of the plot as occurring some time after the narrator's present. Often, these upcoming events are described such that the narrator has foreknowledge (or supposed foreknowledge) of their future, so many future-tense stories have a prophetic tone.
Stream of consciousness gives the (typically first-person) narrator's perspective by attempting to replicate the thought processes—as opposed to simply the actions and spoken words—of the narrative character.[23] Often, interior monologues and inner desires or motivations, as well as pieces of incomplete thoughts, are expressed to the audience but not necessarily to other characters. Examples include the multiple narrators' feelings in William Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury and As I Lay Dying, and the character Offred's often fragmented thoughts in Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale. Irish writer James Joyce exemplifies this style in his novel Ulysses.
Unreliable narration involves the use of an untrustworthy narrator. This mode may be employed to give the audience a deliberate sense of disbelief in the story or a level of suspicion or mystery as to what information is meant to be true and what is meant to be false. Unreliable narrators are usually first-person narrators; a third-person narrator may also be unreliable.[24] An example is J.D. Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye, in which the novel's narrator Holden Caulfield is biased, emotional and juvenile, divulging or withholding certain information deliberately and at times probably quite unreliable.
↑ Hühn, Peter; Sommer, Roy (2012). "Narration in Poetry and Drama". The Living Handbook of Narratology. Interdisciplinary Center for Narratology, University of Hamburg.
↑ Chamberlain, Daniel Frank (1990). Narrative Perspective in Fiction: A Phenomenological Meditation of Reader, Text, and World. ITHAKA. ISBN9780802058386. JSTOR10.3138/j.ctt2ttgv0.
↑ James McCracken, ed. (2011). The Oxford English Dictionary (Onlineed.). Oxford University Press. Retrieved 16 October 2011.
↑ Boris Uspensky, A Poetics of Composition: The Structure of the Artistic Text and Typology of Compositional Form, trans. Valentina Zavarin and Susan Wittig (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1973).
↑ Susan Sniader Lanser, The Narrative Act: Point of View in Prose Fiction (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. 1981).
↑ Murphy, Terence Patrick; Walsh, Kelly S. (2017). "Unreliable Third Person Narration? The Case of Katherine Mansfield". Journal of Literary Semantics. 46 (1): 67–85. doi:10.1515/jls-2017-0005. S2CID171741675.
Further reading
Rasley, Alicia (2008). The Power of Point of View: Make Your Story Come to Life (1sted.). Cincinnati, Ohio: Writer's Digest Books. ISBN978-1-59963-355-8.
A first-person narrative is a mode of storytelling in which a storyteller recounts events from that storyteller's own personal point of view, using first-person grammar such as "I", "me", "my", and "myself". It must be narrated by a first-person character, such as a protagonist, re-teller, witness, or peripheral character. Alternatively, in a visual storytelling medium, the first-person perspective is a graphical perspective rendered through a character's visual field, so the camera is "seeing" out of a character's eyes.
A story within a story, also referred to as an embedded narrative, is a literary device in which a character within a story becomes the narrator of a second story. Multiple layers of stories within stories are sometimes called nested stories. A play may have a brief play within it, such as in Shakespeare's play Hamlet; a film may show the characters watching a short film; or a novel may contain a short story within the novel. A story within a story can be used in all types of narration including poems, and songs.
A narrative, story, or tale is any account of a series of related events or experiences, whether non-fictional or fictional. Narratives can be presented through a sequence of written or spoken words, through still or moving images, or through any combination of these. The word derives from the Latin verb narrare, which is derived from the adjective gnarus. The formal and literary process of constructing a narrative—narration—is one of the four traditional rhetorical modes of discourse, along with argumentation, description, and exposition. This is a somewhat distinct usage from narration in the narrower sense of a commentary used to convey a story. Many additional narrative techniques, particularly literary ones, are used to build and enhance any given story.
Diegesis is a style of fiction storytelling in which a participating narrator offers an on-site, often interior, view of the scene to the reader, viewer, or listener by subjectively describing the actions and, in some cases, thoughts, of one or more characters. Diegetic events are those experienced by both the characters within a piece and the audience, while non-diegetic elements of a story make up the "fourth wall" separating the characters from the audience. Diegesis in music describes a character's ability to hear the music presented for the audience, in the context of musical theatre or film scoring.
In literature, film, and other such arts, an unreliable narrator is a narrator who cannot be trusted, one whose credibility is compromised. They can be found in fiction and film, and range from children to mature characters. While unreliable narrators are almost by definition first-person narrators, arguments have been made for the existence of unreliable second- and third-person narrators, especially within the context of film and television, but sometimes also in literature.
In literature and writing, stylistic devices are a variety of techniques used to give an auxiliary meaning, idea, or feeling.
Narratology is the study of narrative and narrative structure and the ways that these affect human perception. The term is an anglicisation of French narratologie, coined by Tzvetan Todorov. Its theoretical lineage is traceable to Aristotle (Poetics) but modern narratology is agreed to have begun with the Russian formalists, particularly Vladimir Propp, and Mikhail Bakhtin's theories of heteroglossia, dialogism, and the chronotope first presented in The Dialogic Imagination (1975).
A plot twist is a literary technique that introduces a radical change in the direction or expected outcome of the plot in a work of fiction. When it happens near the end of a story, it is known as a twist ending or surprise ending. It may change the audience's perception of the preceding events, or introduce a new conflict that places it in a different context. A plot twist may be foreshadowed, to prepare the audience to accept it, but it usually comes with some element of surprise. There are various methods used to execute a plot twist, such as withholding information from the audience, or misleading them with ambiguous or false information. Not every plot has a twist, but some have multiple lesser ones, and some are defined by a single major twist.
Gérard Genette was a French literary theorist, associated in particular with the structuralist movement and with figures such as Roland Barthes and Claude Lévi-Strauss, from whom he adapted the concept of bricolage.
Narrative paradigm is a communication theory conceptualized by 20th-century communication scholar Walter Fisher. The paradigm claims that all meaningful communication occurs via storytelling or reporting of events. Humans participate as storytellers and observers of narratives. This theory further claims that stories are more persuasive than arguments. Essentially the narrative paradigm helps us to explain how humans are able to understand complex information through narrative.
Organizational storytelling is a concept in management and organization studies. It recognises the special place of narration in human communication, making narration "the foundation of discursive thought and the possibility of acting in common." This follows the narrative paradigm, a view of human communication based on the conception of persons as homo narrans.
Narrative criticism focuses on the stories a speaker or a writer tells to understand how they help us make meaning out of our daily human experiences. Narrative theory is a means by which we can comprehend how we impose order on our experiences and actions by giving them a narrative form. According to Walter Fisher, narratives are fundamental to communication and provide structure for human experience and influence people to share common explanations and understandings. Fisher defines narratives as "symbolic actions-words and/or deeds that have sequence and meaning for those who live, create, or interpret them." Study of narrative criticism, therefore, includes form, genre, structure characterization, and communicator's perspective.
Free indirect speech is the literary technique of writing a character's first-person thoughts in the voice of the third-person narrator. It is a style using aspects of third-person narration conjoined with the essence of first-person direct speech. The technique is also referred to as free indirect discourse, free indirect style, or, in French, discours indirect libre.
Fiction writing is the composition of non-factual prose texts. Fictional writing often is produced as a story meant to entertain or convey an author's point of view. The result of this may be a short story, novel, novella, screenplay, or drama, which are all types of fictional writing styles. Different types of authors practice fictional writing, including novelists, playwrights, short story writers, radio dramatists and screenwriters.
Focalisation is a term coined by the French narrative theorist Gérard Genette. It refers to the perspective through which a narrative is presented. Genette focuses on the interplay between three forms of focalization and the distinction between heterodiegetic and homodiegetic narrators. Homodiegetic narrators exist in the same storyworld as the characters exist in, whereas heterodiegetic narrators are not a part of that storyworld. The term 'focalization' refers to how information is restricted in storytelling. Genette distinguishes between internal focalization, external focalization, and zero focalization. Internal focalization means that the narrative focuses on thoughts and emotions while external focalization focuses solely on characters' actions, behavior, the setting etc. Zero focalization is seen when the narrator is omniscient in the sense that it is not restricted.
In linguistics, psychology, and literary theory, the concepts of deictic field and deictic shift are sometimes deployed in the study of narrative media. These terms provide a theoretical framework for helping literary analysts to conceptualize the ways in which readers redirect their attention away from their immediate surroundings as they become immersed in the reality generated by the text.
Multiperspectivity is a characteristic of narration or representation, where more than one perspective is represented to the audience.
The Novel: An Introduction is a general introduction to narratology, written by Christoph Bode, Full Professor and Chair of Modern English Literature in the Department of English and American Studies at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München. The first edition of Der Roman was published 2005 at A. Francke Verlag in German; in 2011, the second revised and extended German edition followed, as well as the English translation.
Audience immersion is a storytelling technique which attempts to make the audience feel as though they are a part of the story or performance, a state which may be referred to as "transportation" into the narrative, permitting high levels of suspension of disbelief. Audience immersion may be used to enhance learning or to create a more realistic experience. Various methods may be employed to this end, including narrative perspective in writing or technical design in the performing arts. An early example of audience immersion is from the 1846 travelogue Pictures from Italy by Charles Dickens, in which the narrator, speaking in the first person, addresses the reader using second-person pronouns, allowing the reader to "picture themselves with Dickens as he travels."
The Man I Became is a fictional work written by Dutch postmodernist writer Peter Verhelst. It is translated from the Dutch by David Colmer. The satirical work focuses on modern society's excessive materialism and individualism. Set primarily in a location known as "Dreamland", an amusement park designed to integrate animals into a human society, the story is told from the perspective of an unnamed captive gorilla as he progresses through the trials of becoming human.
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