Which Feminist Themes Do These Two Passages Have In Common? Check All Of The Boxes That Apply.
This 96 pp guide covers basic terms, approaches and models of narratological analysis. Recent revisions focus on an extended model of 'constructivist focalization' (still the most innovative section and personal hobby-horse), a revised chapter on embedded discourses including a taxonomy of quotational styles (such as DD, ID, FID etc.), plus updated links and references.
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[1]
Manfred Jahn
Narratology 2.3: A Guide to the Theory of Narrative
Full reference: Jahn, Manfred. 2021. Narratology 2. 3: A Guide to the Theory of Narrative.
English Department, University of Cologne. URL www.uni-koeln.de/~ame02/pppn.pdf.
Date: June 2021.
Project page: www.uni-koeln.de/~ame02/ppp.htm
Homepage: www.uni-koeln.de/~ame02/
This tutorial offers a toolbox of basic narratological concepts, approaches, and models, and shows how
to put it to work in the analysis of fiction.
Changelog
Version 2.3: Bookmarked all graphics. Two 'multi-part mind maps' to complement WHO narrates
WHAT HOW (Fig.2): WHO perceives WHAT from WHICH POV (Fig. 7) and WHO characterizes WHOM
HOW in WHAT CONTEXT (Fig. 15). Some test questions in 7.5 (Characterization).
Version 2.2: More pointers to recent research, some new graphics (conceptual blending in Room at the
Top, 3.2.26.2, Lanser's homodiegesis scale, 3.3.3, discourse time vs story time in Joyce's "A Painful
Case", 5.2.2 ), three additional case studies (multiple focalization in The Solid Mandala (9.2),
Siegfried's last tale (9.3), and conversational story-telling in Wilder's The Apartment (9.4 ). The PDF
now comes with a bookmark panel listing the document's main sections.
Contents
1. Getting started
2. The narratological framework
2.1 Background and basics
2.2. Narrative genres
2.3. Narrative communication
2.4. Narrative levels
3. Narration, focalization, and narrative situations
3.1. Narration
3.2. Focalization (point of view)
3.3. Narrative situation
4. Action, story analysis, tellability
5. Tense, time, and narrative modes
5.1. Narrative tenses
5.2. Time analysis
5.3. Narrative modes
6. Setting and fictional space
7. Characters and characterization
8. Discourses: quoting speech, thought, and writing
9. Case studies
9.1. Homodiegetic dialogue in Alan Sillitoe's "The Fishing Boat Picture"
9.2. Heterodiegetic multiple focalization in Patrick White's The Solid Mandala
9.3 . Immersion with a vengeance: Siegfried's last tale
9.4. Conversational storytelling in Billy Wilder's The Apartment
References
Tip: use Shift-Ctrl clicks to open links in a separate browser tab.
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1. Getting started
This chapter builds a toolbox of basic narratological concepts and shows how to put it to work in the
analysis of fiction. The definitions are based on a number of classical introductions – specifically,
Genette (1980 [1972]; 1988 [1983], key terms: voice, homo- and heterodiegetic, focalization);
Chatman (1978, key terms: overtness, covertness), Lanser (1981; key terms: voice, human limitation,
omniscience); Stanzel (1982/1984, key terms: narrative situation, authorial, figural, reflector), Bal
(1985, key term: focalizer), Fludernik (1996, key term: natural narratology).
1.1. Normally, the literature department of a bookshop is subdivided into sections that reflect the
traditional genres – Poetry, Drama, and Fiction. The texts that one finds in the Fiction department are
novels and short stories (short stories are usually published in an anthology or a collection). In order
to facilitate comparison, all passages quoted in the following are taken from the first chapters of
novels. Thus, as a side effect, this section will also be a survey of incipits (beginnings). Hey, that's
one technical term out of the way already.
The foregoing decision to focus on fictional narratives is motivated by purely practical reasons. Many
theorists prefer to kick off by discussing more elementary forms, especially real-world 'natural'
narratives such as anecdotes, gossip, jokes etc, and then work their way up to fiction. Here,
acknowledging the natural foundation of all narratives, we will jump right into fiction. Novels are an
extremely rich and varied medium: everything you can find in other forms of narratives you find in the
novel; and most of what you find in the novel you can find in other narrative forms.
1.2. First, we need to define narrative itself. We do this by asking: What are the main ingredients of a
narrative? What must a narrative have for it to count as narrative? For a simple answer let us observe
that (i) all narratives have a story, and (ii) all stories are populated by characters. Stories can be told
in the modes of spoken or written text, film, picture, performance, or combinations thereof. In verbally
told stories, such as we are dealing with here, we also have a story-teller, a narrator. This Getting
Started section will mainly focus on narrators and characters. Let me repeat our first simple definitions
in the bullet format that will be used widely in this script:
• narrative: anything that tells or presents a story.
• story: a sequence of events involving characters.
• narrator: the teller of the narrative; the person who articulates ("speaks") the narrative text.
1.3. Let's go to the bookshelf, get out a few novels, open them on page 1, and see what we can do to
get an analytical grip on them. Note that in a real-life face-to-face story-telling situation
(conversational/natural narrative), the narrator is a flesh-and-blood person, somebody who sees us
and whom we can see and hear. But what do we know of a textual narrator when all we have is lines
of print? Can such a narrator have a voice, and if so, how can it become manifest in a text? Consider
our first excerpt, from the beginning of J.D. Salinger's Catcher in the Rye (first published 1951).
Chapter One
If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you'll probably want to know is where I was born, and what
my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that
David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don't feel like going into it. In the first place, that stuff bores me, and in
the second place, my parents would have about two haemorrhages apiece if I told anything pretty personal
about them. They are nice and all – I'm not saying that – but they are also touchy as hell. Besides, I'm not
going to tell you my whole goddamn autobiography or anything. I'll just tell you about this madman stuff that
happened to me around last Christmas before I got pretty run-down and had to come out here and take it easy.
Even though we cannot actually see or hear the narrator, the text contains a number of elements that
project the narrator's voice. It is not very hard to read it out loud and give it an appropriate intonation,
perhaps making it sound like the voice of a teenage boy. If you are familiar with the text you will know
that the narrator, Holden Caulfield, is actually seventeen. Much the same happens when you read an
email from a friend and her voice projects from some typical expressions – so that you can practically
"hear her speak". A reader can hear a textual voice with his or her 'mind's ear', just as s/he will be
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able to see the story's action with his or her mind's eye. We will say that all novels project a
narrative voice, some more distinct, some less, some to a greater, some to a lesser degree. Because
a text can project a narrative voice we will also refer to the text as a narrative discourse. One of the
narratological key texts is Genette (1980 [1972]), a study entitled Narrative Discourse; another is
Chatman (1978), Story and Discourse. So, we are evidently on the right track. We focus our attention
on a novel's narrative voice by asking Who speaks the narrative discourse? Obviously, the more
information we have on a narrator, the more concrete will be our sense of the quality and
distinctiveness of his or her voice.
1.4. Which textual elements in particular project a narrative voice? Here is an (incomplete) list of the
kinds of 'voice markers' that one might look out for:
• Content matter: obviously, there are naturally and culturally appropriate voices for sad and
happy, comic and tragic subjects (though precise type of intonation never follows
automatically). It is clear, however, that the phrasing "my parents would have about two
haemorrhages apiece if I told anything pretty personal about them" (in the passage qtd above)
uses a characteristically vocal rhetoric of exaggeration.
• Subjective expressions: expressions that indicate the narrator's education, his/her beliefs,
convictions, interests, values, emotions, political and ideological orientation, attitude towards
people, events, and things. In Salinger's text, we do not only get an idea about the narrator's
age and background, his discourse is full of value judgments, terms of endearment,
disparagement, and expletives. In the passage quoted he calls his parents "nice and all" (the
word "nice" is rendered as italicized emphasis); he does not want to write a "goddamn
autobiography", he alludes to "all that crap" and the "madman stuff" that happened to him, and
so on.
• Pragmatic signals: expressions that signal the narrator's awareness of an audience and the
degree of his/her orientation towards it. Verbal storytelling, like speaking in general, takes
place in a communicative setting comprising a speaker and an audience (or, a bit more
generally, in order to account for written communication as well, an addresser and an
addressee).
1.5. In the Salinger passage, the narrator frequently addresses an addressee using the second person
pronoun you. Although this is exactly what we expect in ordinary conversational storytelling, if you
look (and listen) closely, you will notice that Holden treats his addressee more as an imagined entity
than as somebody who is bodily present. For instance, he is careful to say "if you really want to hear
about it [...] you'll probably want to know". This rather sounds as if he is addressing somebody whom
he does not know very closely. Nor does the addressee actually say anything. At this point, we cannot
tell whether Holden has a particular addressee in mind, or whether he addresses a more general,
perhaps merely hypothetical audience. "You" could be either singular or plural. Some critics assume
that Holden's addressee is a psychiatrist, and "here", the place where Holden can "take it easy" after
all that "madman stuff", might well refer to a mental hospital. Frankly, I have forgotten whether the
question is ever resolved in the novel. What is important at this point is that it can make a difference
in principle whether the narrative is uttered as a private or a public communication, to a present or an
absent audience.
1.6. Oddly enough, there is one specific audience that neither Holden Caulfield nor any other narrator
in fiction can ever be concretely aware of, and that is us, the audience of real readers. We are reading
Salinger's novel, not Holden's; as a matter of fact, Holden isn't writing a novel at all, he is telling a tale
of personal experience (also called PEN for 'personal experience narrative'). The novel's text projects a
narrative voice, but the text's narrator is temporally, spatially, and ontologically distant from us.
Ontologically distant means he belongs to a different world, a fictional world. Fictional means invented,
imaginary, not real. The narrator, his/her addressee, the characters in the story – all are fictional
beings. Put slightly differently, Holden Caulfield is a 'paper being' (Barthes) invented by Salinger, the
novel's author. And again, Salinger's novel is a novel about somebody telling a story of personal
experience, while Holden's story is the story of that personal experience.
Just as it is a good idea not to confuse a narrator (Holden, a fictional being) with the author (Salinger,
the real person who actually wrote the novel and earned lots of money on it), we must not confuse a
fictional addressee (the text's "you") with ourselves, the real readers. Holden cannot possibly address
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us because he does not know we exist. Conversely, we cannot talk to Holden (unless we do it in our
imagination) because we know he does not exist. By contrast, the relationship between us and real-life
authors is real enough. We can write them a letter; we can ask them to sign our copy (supposing they
are still alive). Even when they are dead, readers who appreciate their work will talk about them and
ensure their lasting reputation. There are no such points of contact with Holden. The closest analogy to
a real-life scenario is when we read a message which was not intended for our eyes, or when we
overhear a conversation whose participants are unaware of the fact that we are (illicitly) listening in.
Thus, in a sense, novels offer us a socially acceptable way of eavesdropping.
1.7. What we have just established is the standard structure of fictional narrative communication.
Participants and levels are usually shown in a 'Chinese boxes' model. Basically, communicative contact
is possible between (1) author and reader on the level of nonfictional communication, (2) narrator and
audience or addressee(s) on the level of fictional communication or 'mediation', and (3) characters on
the level of action. The first level is an 'extratextual level'; levels two and three are 'intratextual'.
Fig. 1. Levels of narrative communication.
1.8. The beginning of Salinger's novel projects quite a distinctive narrative voice. Other novels project
other kinds of voices, and sometimes it is quite difficult to pinpoint their exact quality. What, for
instance, do you make of the following incipit to James Gould Cozzens's A Cure of Flesh (first published
1933)?
ONE
THE snowstorm, which began at dawn on Tuesday, February 17th, and did not stop when darkness came,
extended all over New England. It covered the state of Connecticut with more than a foot of snow. As early as
noon, Tuesday, United States Highway No. 6W, passing through New Winton, had become practically
impassable. Wednesday morning the snow-ploughs were out. Thursday was warmer. The thin coat of snow
left by the big scrapers melted off. Thursday night the wind went around west while the surface dried. Friday,
under clear, intensely cold skies, US6W's three lane concrete was clear again from Long Island Sound to the
Massachusetts line.
Contrast this narrative discourse to the narrative discourse that we heard in Salinger's text. The
Salinger passage gave us plenty of information about the pragmatic parameters of the narrative
situation: there was an addressee (a "you") who was spoken to, and we had rich indications of the
narrator's language and emotional constitution. None of this is to be found in the present passage.
Knowing the rest of the novel, I can tell you that we will never learn the narrator's name, he
will
never use the first-person pronoun (that is, will never refer to himself), and he will never directly
speak to his addressee. Yet we can recognize well enough that this is a narrator who begins his
narrative with an exposition of the setting of the story. To do that he picks out a series of points both
in time and space, spanning a timeframe of Tuesday to Friday, ie four days, and spacewise touching on
Lanser's rule (3.1.3.) will be observed throughout – if the narrator is nameless, I will use a pronoun that is
appropriate for the real-life author. Cozzens is a male author; hence I refer to the covert narrator in the passage
as "he".
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New England, Long Island Sound and the Massachusetts line, all in a matter of seven lines. But radical
as the summary is, we can easily connect the spatial and temporal dots to get a good initial picture.
Note, by the way, the camera-like 'shots' that pick out graphic detail such as the snowstorm, the
three-lane highway, and the snow ploughs. Later in this script we will assume that the narrator has
eyes (and a virtual camera) in addition to a voice. Indeed, the film-like incipit may offer a clue to the
narrator's voice – think of an actual film using a narrator's voiceover, and consider what this voice
might sound like.
It is difficult to imagine somebody speaking or writing without using any style at all (we will come to
such a case, however). In ordinary circumstances, one is required to speak 'co-operatively' (as
pragmaticists put it), that is to say, one selects expressions that are suitable to the purpose in hand,
and suitable expressions rely on assumptions about possible hearers and readers, their informative
needs, intellectual capabilities, interests, etc. Normally, we do that intuitively and habitually, or at any
rate ought to. Approaching the matter from this angle, one can see that Cozzens's narrator presents a
sequence of concise statements which very adequately serve a reader's needs. Reading the passage
out loud we'd probably give it a neutral and matter-of-fact voice. A matter-of -fact voice is definitely
more than no voice. At the same time, compared to Holden's voice, this narrator's voice is more
neutral, less emotional, slightly less distinctive.
1.9. Having established the foregoing difference in distinctiveness, the audibility of a narrative voice is
best understood as being a matter of degrees. Following Chatman (1978), narrative theorists often use
the oppositional terms overtness and covertness to characterize a narrative voice, adding whichever
qualification or gradation is needed. Narrators can be more or less overt and more or less covert. Both
Holden Caulfield and Cozzens' anonymous narrator are overt narrators, but Holden is the more overt
(or, if you want, less covert) one of the two.
Fully or near covert narrators, now, must have a largely indistinctive or indeterminable voice. Although
we have yet to meet fully covert narration as a phenomenon, let us briefly speculate on how it might
come about at all. Think of covertness as the opposite of overtness. Then, by simply inverting our
definition of overtness, we can say that a covert narrator must be an inconspicuous and indistinctive
narrator – a narrator who fades into the background, one who camouflages him- or herself, who goes
into hiding some other way. What hiding strategies are there? Obviously, one can try not to draw
attention to oneself – hence a narrator who wishes to stay covert will avoid talking about him- or
herself, will also avoid a loud or striking voice, and will also avoid any of the pragmatic or expressivity
markers mentioned in 1.4 . One can also hide behind somebody – keep this in mind; it will get us
somewhere.
1.10. So far we have been talking about a narrator's voice as projecting from textual expressions
signaling emotion, subjectivity, pragmatics, rhetoric, purpose etc. Let us now turn to the question of
the narrator's relationship to, or involvement in, his or her story. There are two basic options: (i) the
narrator tells a story about himself or herself (a first-person narrative, also called story of
personal experience), or (ii) the narrator tells a story about other people (a third-person
narrative). Very frequently, however, in modern narratological analysis you will note that these terms
are substituted by two terms invented by Genette (1980 [1972]), namely, homodiegetic narrative
(= roughly, first-person narrative) and heterodiegetic narrative (= third-person narrative). If it
helps, diegetic means 'pertaining to narrating'; homo means 'of the same nature', and hetero means
'of a different nature'. The detailed definitions are as follows:
• In a homodiegetic narrative the (homodiegetic) narrator tells a story of personal experience.
In other words, he or she is also one of story's acting characters. A homodiegetic narrator
therefore splits up into a narrating-I (telling the story on the level of fictional communication)
and an experiencing-I (on the level of action).
• In a heterodiegetic narrative, the story is told by a (heterodiegetic) narrator who is not
present as a character in the story. A heterodiegetic narrator can have a narrating-I (using the
first person on the level of fictional communication) but s/he cannot have an experiencing-I.
In other words (please verify), a homodiegetic narrative must have an experiencing-I, whereas a
heterodiegetic narrative must not have an experiencing-I.
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1.11. On the 'pronoun problem' in narrative texts – if you really want to hear about it, as Holden
would say, and if you do not feel free to jump forward to the next. Okay then, the unfortunate fact is,
pronouns can be deceptive. Usually, Genette's two types correlate with a text's use of first-person and
third-person pronouns – I, me, mine, we, us, our, etc, as opposed to he, she, him, her, they, their,
etc. In fact, it is tempting to say that:
• 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 a
narrator's experiencing-I;
• a text is heterodiegetic if all of its story-related action sentences are third-person sentences
(She did this, this was what happened to him).
However, as you notice, all now hinges on "some" and "all" in these definitions, and on a proper
understanding of the term 'action sentence'. Action sentences present events involving one or more
characters. For instance, "He jumped from the bridge" (= willful action), and "She fell from the bridge"
(= involuntary action), and "I said, 'Hello'" (= speech act) are action sentences. By contrast, "Here
comes the sad part of our story", and "It was a dark and stormy night" (ie, a comment and a
description, respectively) are not action sentences.
A novel is a type of text that makes use of many kinds of sentences, and not all of them are action
sentences – for instance, descriptions, quotations, comments, etc, are not. Indeed, as we have seen,
many novels begin with an exposition-oriented prologue (a 'block exposition'), introducing characters
and setting, often via descriptive statements. While such prologues tell us a lot about the quality of the
narrative voice (cp the Salinger and the Cozzens passages above), they do not necessarily tell us
whether the narrative is going to be homodiegetic or heterodiegetic. It is only when the story itself
gets going, employing proper action sentences as defined above, that we get into a position to judge
whether the narrator is present or absent as an acting character (ie, has or hasn't an experiencing-I).
Actually, sometimes we have to wait quite a while until we get the full picture of the narrator's
relationship to his or her story. In most novels, however, granting some exceptions, a narrator's
relation to the story will become reasonably clear very quickly.
1.12. We have, of course, already discussed a homodiegetic passage, namely Salinger's Catcher in the
Rye. If you recall, this is a story about "what happened to me", which already is a neat formula
definition of first-person storytelling. For another straightforward case, let us consider the beginning of
Margaret Drabble's The Millstone (published 1965).
My career has always been marked by a strange mixture of confidence and cowardice: almost, one might say,
made by it. Take for instance, the first time I tried spending a night with a man in a hotel. I was nineteen at the
time, an age appropriate for such adventures, and needless to say I was not married. I am still not married, a
fact of some significance, but more of that later. The name of the boy, if I remember rightly, was Hamish. I do
remember rightly. I really must try not to be deprecating. Confidence, not cowardice, is the part of myself
which I admire, after all.
Hamish and I had just come down from Cambridge at the end of the Christmas term: we had conceived our
plan well in advance.
For analysis, I will simply repeat the text, inserting some analytical annotations:
My career [aha, this looks like a story of personal experience, perhaps an autobiography] has always been
marked by a strange mixture of confidence and cowardice: almost, one might say, made by it [evidently a
topic sentence presumably spoken in the tone of reflective comment]. Take for instance [=You take ... the
narrator acknowledges an addressee and provides the first illustration to the foregoing generalization], the
first time I tried spending a night with a man [the narrator is likely to be female, so this is probably a female
voice] in a hotel. I was nineteen at the time [this is the age of the experiencing-I, the present narrating-I is
clearly older, presumably wiser, more advanced on her "career"], an age appropriate for such adventures, and
needless to say I was not married. I am still not married [further self-characterization of the narrating-I], a
fact of some significance [narrator giving a pointer to what's going to be "significant"], but more of that later.
The name of the boy, if I remember rightly [note, narrator's main activity is remembering], was Hamish. I do
remember rightly [self-conscious correction]. I really must try not to be deprecating [evaluation and allusion
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to tone of voice]. Confidence, not cowardice, is the part of myself which I admire, after all. Hamish and I had
just come down from Cambridge at the end of the Christmas term: we had conceived our plan well in advance
... [this is still background action and therefore presented in the past perfect but the narrator will soon shift
into ordinary past-tense action presentation].
1.13. According to Genette, Drabble's novel is a homodiegetic narrative on the strength of the single
'relation' criterion that the narrator is present as a character in her story. In order to assess the typical
implications of such a scenario, and put them to work in an interpretation, we will also make use of
Stanzel's theory of typical narrative situations. For this line of inquiry, it is important to remind
oneself , first of all, that a homodiegetic narrator always tells a story of personal experience, whereas a
heterodiegetic narrator tells a story about other people's experiences. According to Stanzel, Drabble's
text is a typical first-person narrative (in the context of narrative situations, we will prefer this term
over homodiegetic narrative) because the narrator tells an autobiographical story about a set of past
experiences – experiences that evidently shaped and changed her life and made her into what she is
today. Like other typical first-person narrators, she is subject to ordinary human limitations
(Lanser): she is restricted to a personal and subjective point of view; she has no direct access to (or
authority on) events she did not witness in person; she can't be in two places at the same time (this is
sometimes called the law against bilocation), and she has no way of knowing for certain what went on
in the minds of other characters (in philosophy, this restriction is called the "Other Minds" problem). It
is obvious that a narrator's handling of these limitations, and a text's relative closeness to, or distance
from, such typicality conditions ('default conditions') can tell us a lot about the 'slant' or attitude of the
narrative voice as well as the motives for telling the story.
1.14. Let us now turn to an example of heterodiegetic narration and consider the beginning of George
Eliot's Adam Bede (first published 1859). This time, I am directly adding various annotations.
CHAPTER I
THE WORKSHOP
With a single drop of ink for a mirror, the Egyptian sorcerer undertakes to reveal to any chance comer far-
reaching visions of the past. This is what I undertake to do for you, reader. [Self-reference of an overt
narrator, and acknowledgment of a reader-addressee, also a 'metanarrative comment', ie a reflection on the
nature of storytelling itself.] With this drop of ink at the end of my pen I will show you the roomy workshop
of Mr. Jonathan Burge, carpenter and builder in the village of Hayslope, as it appeared on the eighteenth of
June, in the year of our Lord 1799. [Deliberate, addressee-conscious exposition of time and place of action
(already alluded to in chapter subheading).]
The afternoon sun was warm on the five workmen there, busy upon doors and window-frames and
wainscoting. A scent of pine-wood from a tent-like pile of planks outside the open door mingled itself with
the scent of the elder-bushes which were spreading their summer snow close to the open window opposite
[...]. [A] rough grey shepherd-dog [...] was lying with his nose between his forepaws, occasionally wrinkling
his brows to cast a glance at the tallest of the five workmen, who was carving a shield in the centre of a
wooden mantelpiece. It was to this workman that the strong baritone belonged which was heard above the
sound of plane and hammer [...].
Conceivably, you may be puzzled why this has been classified as a heterodiegetic text. After all, aren't
there three first-person pronouns (two "I"s, one "my") in the first paragraph? True enough, but
nothing follows from it because any narrator can refer to him- or herself using the first-person
pronoun. Looking at first-person pronouns and overlooking the context in which they occur is just like
walking into a trap – the notorious "first-person pronoun trap". Re-check the definitions above to
ensure that the only thing that is relevant for determining whether a text is homodiegetic or
heterodiegetic is the relation of the narrator to his or her story – if they are present in the action, they
are homodiegetic, if they are absent from it they are heterodiegetic. The first paragraph of Eliot's novel
gives us the background setting of the story, uttered by a highly overt narrator. In this respect the
three first-person pronouns are relevant, but they project a narratorial identity and a vocal quality, but
not a relation. We are listening to a narrating-I, an overt narrator, but whether this is going to be a
story of personal experience or not is still an open question. At the same time one can already sense
that the exposition is presented by someone who is above and beyond all the people and things in the
story. This is not really a remembering voice as in the Drabble excerpt. Apparently the narrator knows
all the facts, yet nobody is going to ask her how she came by her knowledge. When the story gets
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going in the second paragraph, all characters in it – so far, at any rate – are third-person characters.
Any first-person identifying an acting or speaking character in the action itself would be significant
indeed because it would signal an experiencing-I. But nothing like that happens. As a matter of fact,
we'd all be a bit surprised, I suppose, if the second paragraph began with the words "The afternoon
sun was warm on the five workmen there, and I was one of them".
1.15. Remember, a heterodiegetic narrator is somebody who is not, and never was, a character in the
world of the story. The fact that a heterodiegetic narrator has a position outside the world of the story
makes it easy for us to accept what we would never accept in real life – that somebody should have
unlimited knowledge and authority. Heterodiegetic narrators typically assume the power of
omniscience – knowing everything – as if this were the most natural thing in the world. When inclined
to speak overtly, heterodiegetic narrators can speak directly to their addressees, and they can liberally
comment on action, characters, and storytelling itself (as happens in the Eliot excerpt above).
Homodiegetic narrators can do that too, of course, but owing to their human limitations, especially
their lack of omniscience, their limited knowledge, and their always selective memory, style and
content tend to be quite different. In practice, following Stanzel, we will call a heterodiegetic narrative
with a highly overt narrator (as in Eliot's text) an authorial narrative situation, or just plain
authorial narration. Of course, an authorial narrator's comprehensive and authoritative world-view is
particularly suited to reveal the moral strengths and weaknesses of the characters. Typical authorial
texts are the 19C novels of 'social realism' by authors such as George Eliot, Charlotte Brontë, Charles
Dickens, and Thomas Hardy.
1.16. As pointed out above, Genette's categorical distinctions (homo- and heterodiegetic), which are
based on a clear-cut 'relation' condition (narrator present or absent in the story), can be fruitfully
complemented by considering the typicality conditions, expectations, and implications that come with
Stanzel's narrative situations (first-person and authorial narration, so far). Things get a bit more
complicated now because Stanzel's model allows yet another typical narrative situation. Because it is a
difficult type, and comes with traps of its own, I will approach it with due caution. But you can
probably guess what is coming.
Recall that in the preceding paragraph authorial narration was tied to a heterodiegetic and overt, ie ,
distinctively voiced narrator. We are now going to refocus our attention on the question of overtness
and covertness. All set? Brace yourself, then, and consider this beginning of Ernest Hemingway's For
Whom the Bell Tolls (first published 1943).
CHAPTER ONE
He lay flat on the brown, pine-needled floor of the forest, his chin on his folded arms, and high overhead the
wind blew in the tops of the pine trees. The mountainside sloped gently where he lay; but below it was steep
and he could see the dark of the oiled road winding through the pass. There was a stream alongside the road
and far down the pass he saw a mill beside the stream and the falling water of the dam, white in the summer
sunlight.
"Is that the mill?" he asked.
"Yes."
]1.17. In the Hemingway passage, the narrator's voice is much harder to determine than in all of the
excerpts quoted so far, including the Cozzens passage. There are three reasons for this:
1. We do not get any of the expressivity markers that normally project a distinctive voice – no
first-person self-reference, no value judgments, no italicized emphasis, no indications of a
moral agenda, point of interest or purpose, nothing of the sort.
On a subsequent reading of this script, you might consider the following experiment: suppose the last sentence
were "Yes," I said. What would be the consequences (a) with respect to narrative type according to Genette and
(b) with respect to narrative situation according to Stanzel? Answer: (a) the text would change from
heterodiegetic to homodiegetic because of the appearance of an experiencing-I, (b) the text would change from
figural narrative situation to a first-person narrative situation. However, in both cases it would be difficult to
process it as a coherent incipit.
[9]
2. The narrator is not a co-operative storyteller. He does not acknowledge any actual or
hypothetical addressee(s); quite the contrary, he conspicuously flouts the maxim of addressee-
oriented (reader-friendly) exposition normally expected at the beginning of a novel. After all,
setting and characters have to be introduced somehow. Thus far into the text, however, we
don't know where we are, we don't know who the characters are, how many there are, or what
they are doing there. And, incidentally, if you think they are talking in English (as you are
bound to do, what choice have you got?) you are dead wrong. The only thing one knows at this
point is that the scene opens in some exterior natural setting, a hilly terrain, evidently; it is
daytime, and there are at least two characters talking to each other.
3. The main point, however, is that the narrator seems to withdraw or hide behind the main
character whom we encounter even in the first word of the text. Minutely, from moment to
moment, the text seems to follow this character's perceptual processes – the things he sees,
feels, and hears (note how cleverly this is suggested by terms such as the "pine-needled floor",
the "gently sloping" ground, the wind blowing "overhead"). It won't take long and the text will
also render this character's thoughts, plans, and memories, in short, the whole subjective
landscape of his consciousness. Then we will also – but always incidentally, as it were – learn
more about the story's background – that it is set in the Spanish civil war, that the two
characters are engaged in reconnoitering enemy territory, etc. Note how easy it would have
been for a co-operative narrator to indicate that the characters are communicating in Spanish –
a simple "Sí" instead of a "Yes" would have been an excellent pointer, for instance. But no, he
does not do it. And yet you can be dead certain that Hemingway knows exactly what he is doing
by using such a narrator. Certainly no critic would be silly enough to say this is a bad story
incipit. In fact, it was not until the twentieth century that novelists realized the potential of the
figural narrative situation.
How does the passage work? Clearly, it is both heterodiegetic (narrator not present as a character in
the story) and covert (indistinctive, inconspicuous, neutral narrator's voice). In addition, one of the
story's characters – the central character, in fact – acts as a 'central consciousness' (as Henry James
fittingly put it). The reading experience created by such a text is quite remarkable. (1) Because the
narrator is so covert, the text conveys a sense of 'directness' and 'immediacy' – which is quite logical,
if one reflects on the meanings of 'direct' and 'immediate' (ie, without intercession of a middleman).
(2) Because the text is so strictly aligned with one central character's spatio-temporal co-ordinates of
perception, the reader is drawn into the story and invited to co-experience what it is like to be a
participant – this particular participant – in the unfolding events.
1.18. Here are the technical terms that further describe the phenomena discussed above. The
technique of presenting something from the point of view of a story-internal character is called
internal focalization. The character through whose eyes the action is presented is called an internal
focalizer (some theorists prefer the term reflector, see 3.2 for more detailed definitions). A focalizer
is somebody who focuses his/her attention and perception on something. Note that the Hemingway
passage has two occurrences of the verb see, and more seeing and other perception is implied by
various other expressions and constructions ('perception indicators'). Even though there are two
characters in the action, the subject of the various acts of perception is only one of the two. Finally,
the reader's imaginative adoption of a reflector's point of view is usually called 'immersion' or (a bit
quaintly) 'transposition to the phantasm' (Bühler 1990 [1934]).
Just as we asked Who speaks? in order to identify a text's narrative voice, we can now use the
question Who sees? as a shorthand formula to alert us to the possible presence of an internal focalizer
or reflector, the 'prism' (as some narratologists say) through which we witness the story's events. And,
again following Stanzel, we will call the specific configuration of a heterodiegetic-covert narrative plus
a prominent internal focalization a figural narrative. The Hemingway passage quoted above is a
figural passage, and the narrative situation underlying it is a figural narrative situation. The
Cozzens passage quoted in 1.8 is not a figural passage because there is no reflector figure and no
internal focalization in it. If you need a mnemonic, link reflector figure to figural narration. No reflector
figure, no figural narration. For good measure, here is the more general definition:
• figural narrative A narrative which presents the story's events as seen through the eyes of
(or: from the point of view of) a third-person internal focalizer. The narrator of a figural
narrative is a covert heterodiegetic narrator presenting an internal focalizer's consciousness,
especially his/her perceptions and thoughts. Because the narrator's discourse will preferably
[10]
mimic the focalizer's perceptions and conceptualizations the narrator's own voice quality will
remain largely indistinct. One of the main effects of internal focalization is to attract attention to
the mind of the reflector-character and away from the narrator and the process of narratorial
mediation.
The full extent of figural techniques was first explored in the novels and short stories of 20C authors
such as Henry James, Franz Kafka, Dorothy Richardson, Katherine Mansfield, Virginia Woolf, James
Joyce, and many others. Subduing the 19C overt narrator's intrusive presence, these authors opened
the door to an unmediated access to a character's mind, and through this prism or filter, to the story's
events. Logically enough, the most radical reduction of narrative voice comes when the text presents
nothing but a direct quotation of a reflector's thoughts – as in the form of an 'interior monologue'
(8.9 ). Incidentally, the filmic device of the 'POV shot' (= point-of-view shot) is the direct equivalent of
the technique of internal focalization described here. (Jump to F4.2.4 for a graphic illustration.)
1.19. To recapitulate: in addition to Genette's two basic types of narratives (homodiegetic and
heterodiegetic) our toolbox now also stocks Stanzel's three typical narrative situations: first-person,
authorial (heterodiegetic-overt) and figural (heterodiegetic-covert plus internal focalization).
You will be relieved to learn that most prose narratives establish their narrative situation quickly,
sometimes (as we have seen) in the very first sentence, and then stick to it throughout the whole text.
Be forewarned, however, that there are (i) texts that switch narrative situation from one chapter to the
next (eg, Joyce, Ulysses; Dickens, Bleak House), (ii) texts that switch narrative situations from one
passage to another, and (iii) texts that present a mix or blend of (usually) an authorial and a figural
narrative situation.
1.20. Suppose somebody asked you whether narrative theory has anything of interest to offer on
"How to write a novel". What you could say – after duly pointing out that narrative theory is more
concerned with how narrative texts work than with how to write them – is this. The history of the novel
shows us that there are three tried and tested recipes. Recipe no. 1 gives you what narratologists call
a homodiegetic narrative: You select one of the story's characters and let her/him tell it as a tale of
personal experience. Recipe no. 2 gives you an authorial narrative: You use an overt and
heterodiegetic narrator who does not belong to the cast of characters, invest him/her with far-ranging
knowledge privileges (up to omniscience), and let him/her tell a story of (for instance) social realism.
Finally, recipe no. 3 creates a figural narrative: You use an entirely covert narrator and present the
story as if seen through the eyes of an internal focalizer. (See Abbiati 2012 for more detailed creative
writing tips grounded on precisely these narratological basics.)
1.21. Applying the technical terms defined above, see what you make of the following passage from
Crome Yellow by Aldous Huxley (first published 1921):
Chapter One
Along this particular stretch of line no express had ever passed. All the trains – the few that there were –
stopped at all the stations. Denis knew the names of those stations by heart. Bole, Tritton, Spavin Delawarr,
Knipswich for Timpany, West Bowlby, and, finally, Camlet-on-the-Water. Camlet was where he always got
out, leaving the train to creep indolently onward, goodness only knew whither, into the green heart of
England.
They were snorting out of West Bowlby now. It was the next station, thank Heaven.
Can you say whether this a homodiegetic or a heterodiegetic narrative? Personally, I can't see any
first-person pronoun referring to somebody involved in the action. This isn't what a homodiegetic
narrator remembers, is it? The only story-internal character present at all is somebody called Denis,
and he is referred to by the third person singular pronoun. Is it likely that a first-person character – an
experiencing-I – would suddenly join him out of the blue? I guess not; most likely this is a
heterodiegetic narrative. (And so it is.)
1.22. But now allow me to pose some challenging questions. First, what can one say about the quality
of the narrative voice? Before you answer, compare this current excerpt to the three other
heterodiegetic incipits that we discussed earlier – Cozzens (1.8), Eliot (1.14), Hemingway (1.16).
[11]
Which of these is stylistically closest to the current Huxley incipit? Let me tentatively pursue, just for
fun, two outrageously false tracks in order to show where one might go wrong.
Well then, in the first two sentences, at least, we seem to be getting some background information on
setting and railway lines, right? Is this then like what we had in the Cozzens excerpt, an addressee-
conscious narratorial exposition in a neutral tone of voice? – I do hope you say no because it's plain
wrong. For, unlike the Cozzens incipit, this one has plenty of emotional and subjective expressions in it
– expressions like "goodness only knew", "the green heart of England", "thank Heaven" – and since
these are strong voice markers they suggest a highly overt rather than a neutrally overt voice. So, can
I tempt you to say this is heterodiegetic-overt narration just like in the Eliot incipit? In other words, is
the voice we are hearing the voice of the narrator? - No, of course not, don't let me trap you again.
You will have noted, I am reasonably certain, that the third sentence begins with the words "Denis
knew", and this is a powerful clue. Once we recognize that Denis could be the text's reflector or
internal focalizer – the character through whose eyes we see the action – then the text is rather close
to the figural style of the Hemingway excerpt (1.12 ) . And that is what it is, a figural narrative situation
just like we had in the Hemingway incipit. Let us try to prove our point, if possible beyond any
reasonable doubt.
1.23. Although this is not really a difficult text, the questions raised by it are difficult to answer on a
theoretical level. Any strategy that helps explain how readers process such texts is therefore most
welcome.
One such strategy is the 'FID test' originally proposed by Michael Toolan (2001: 132). FID is a common
abbreviation for free indirect discourse – a term which I am sure you have come across hundreds of
times already in your studies (we'll get to it later, section 8). Put simply, FID is a technique for
rendering a character's speech or thought. FID does this indirectly in the sense that it transposes
pronouns and tenses into the pronoun/tense system of the narrative's ordinary narrative sentences
(for instance, it may shift a first person into a third person, and the present tense into the past). But
there are no quotation marks, and often any identification of speaker, thinker, or perceiver (he
said/thought/noticed etc) is also dropped. As a consequence, there is often no formal difference
between FID (reporting a character's speech or thought) and a plain narratorial statement. Now, it
may not be very important whether a sentence is the one thing or the other – for instance, nothing
may hinge on whether It was twelve o'clock; he had plenty of time to catch the plane is just the
rendering of a character's thought or a piece of information given by the narrator, or even both. Then
again, it may make all the difference: suppose the clock is slow (a fact not known by the charactrer),
the character therefore misses his plane, the plane crashes ... you see what I mean.
In light of this, consider "It was the next station, thank Heaven". If we take that to be a representation
of a thought going through Denis's head, then we construe the sentence as FID. Read as a narratorial
statement, the sentence might express the narrator's relief – "thank heaven" – to have finally come to,
I don't know, this part of the exposition perhaps. Of course, this second reading is an entirely far-
fetched one. In order to test whether a sentence is FID or a narratorial statement, Toolan suggests to
construct two unambiguous and fully explicit versions – one which explicitly binds the sentence to the
point of view of the character, and another which explicitly binds it to the point of view of the narrator.
The next step is to assess, on the strength of content and context, which version has the better "fit".
Contrast these two versions, then:
I, the narrator, can tell you, the reader, that it was the next station, thank Heaven.
It was the next station, thank Heaven, Denis thought.
As might be expected, given the context of the sentence and the general content of the passage, the
second construction is much more plausible than the first one. Hence we conclude that the original
sentence is indeed a FID representation of Denis's thought. We can even 'backshift' it to recover its
putative original form – "It is the next station, thank Heaven" is what Denis very likely thinks, and we
see at once that it fits well. We could say that the FID test registers positively on the sentence in
question. The upshot of this is that we can now claim that the emotional tone projected from "thank
Heaven" is not the narrator's but Denis's.
[12]
1.24. Let us now extend the FID test and turn it into an 'IF test' (this is not a common term), a test of
internal focalization. Internal focalization is mainly concerned with what is present or goes on in a
character's consciousness – thoughts as well as perceptions, feelings, emotions, memories. For
instance, that list of oddly named train stations – is that some kind of information that the narrator
provides for our benefit, or is it something that Denis rehearses in his mind? Again we should use
context and content in order to decide this question. We note, then, that the sentence preceding the
sentence in question actually tells us that Denis knows the names of the stations "by heart". Don't
write this off as an accident; rather, take it as contextual evidence supporting the interpretation that
he is now rehearsing them.
1.25. Huxley's text really requires us to make many similar decisions, and basically they all work out
in the same way. For instance, who is more likely to conceptualize the train's further progress as
"creeping indolently onward" and "snorting out of West Bowlby", the narrator or Denis? Who does not
really know (or perhaps care) where the train goes ultimately – "goodness only knew whither" – the
narrator or Denis? And who is the originator of the image of "the green heart of England"? Recall that a
standard authorial narrator normally has a huge knowledge privilege – up to omniscience, we said.
Well, I trust the pieces of the puzzle have long fallen into place. Yes, it seems we can easily ascribe all
judgments and expressivity markers in this passage to Denis, the internal focalizer. And, somewhat
surprisingly, the FID/IF test even works for the very first sentence, the sentence that may have looked
like plain narratorial exposition at first glance. Compare:
I, the narrator, can tell you, reader, that along this particular stretch of line no express had
ever passed.
Along this particular stretch of line (Denis thought) no express had ever passed.
While the IF test is never absolutely conclusive, it allows us to argue for or against a particular option.
In this case, we see that the internally focalized reading is quite an appropriate one. (Admittedly,
however, the story's first sentence could also be the incipit of an authorial narrative.)
1.26. To confirm our previous intuition, see how the text, as it progresses, jells into a plain case of
figural narration with all that's implied by it:
Denis took his chattels off the rack and piled them neatly in the corner opposite his own. A futile
proceeding. But one must have something to do. When he had finished, he sank back into his seat and closed
his eyes. It was extremely hot.
Oh, this journey! It was two hours cut clean out of his life; two hours in which he might have done so
much, so much – written the perfect poem, for example, or read the one illuminating book. Instead of which –
his gorge rose at the smell of the dusty cushions against which he was leaning.
Two hours. One hundred and twenty minutes. Anything might be done in that time. Anything. Nothing.
Oh, he had had hundreds of hours, and what had he done with them? Wasted them, spilt the precious minutes
as though his reservoir were inexhaustible. Denis groaned in the spirit, condemned himself utterly with all his
works. What right had he to sit in the sunshine, to occupy corner seats in third-class carriages, to be alive?
None, none, none.
Misery and a nameless nostalgic distress possessed him. He was twenty-three, and oh! so agonizingly
conscious of the fact. The train came bumpingly to a halt. Here was Camlet at last.
For an exercise, test your own intuitions by selectively applying the FID/IF test in this passage. Again,
all distinct voice-indicating emotional expressions will attach more plausibly to the internal focalizer
than to the narrator. This confirms what we found earlier, namely that any vocal quality of this text
belongs to the character, not the narrator. Ultimately, we can say very little about the narrator's voice
because the narrator effectively hides (himself and his voice) behind the presentation of the internal
focalizer's voice (and perception and consciousness). One could also say he hides his own voice by
imitating the character's voice.
1.27. Let's try another turn of the screw. As we are coming to the end of this section, I want to test
our present toolbox by looking at two further examples. The first is the incipit of Jane Austen's Emma
first published in 1816). For a fair division of labor, I propose to do most of the work at first, answering
the simple questions, and then you get a chance to have a go at the hard ones.
[13]
CHAPTER 1
EMMA WOODHOUSE, handsome, clever, and rich, with a comfortable home and happy disposition, seemed
to unite some of the best blessings of existence; and had lived nearly twenty-one years in the world with very
little to distress or vex her.
This is clearly an overt narratorial voice engaged in giving concise and reader-conscious expository
information on the main character (a block characterization, as we will say later in this script). The
paragraphs that follow present additional background information on the Woodhouse family. The
narrator introduces a governess, summarizes Emma's childhood and adolescence, and comments on
the developing friendship between the two women thus:
She [Emma] was the youngest of the two daughters of a most affectionate, indulgent father, and had, in
consequence of her sister's marriage, been mistress of his house from a very early period. Her mother had died
too long ago for her to have more than an indistinct remembrance of her caresses, and her place had been
supplied by an excellent woman as governess, who had fallen little short of a mother in affection.
Sixteen years had Miss Taylor been in Mr Woodhouse's family less as a governess than a friend, very fond
of both daughters, but particularly of Emma. Between them it was more the intimacy of sisters. Even before
Miss Taylor had ceased to hold the nominal office of governess, the mildness of her temper had hardly
allowed her to impose any restraint; and the shadow of authority being now long passed away, they had been
living together as friend and friend very mutually attached, and Emma doing just what she liked; highly
esteeming Miss Taylor's judgment, but directed chiefly by her own.
Some of character traits attributed to Emma are obviously wholly conventional, others strike one as
slightly unexpected, perhaps deserving careful attention (and intonation!). Observe the projected tone
of voice in "and Emma doing just what she liked", for instance. At any rate, in the following paragraph,
the narrator gets down to a crucial point – the heroine's personality – more directly.
The real evils indeed of Emma's situation were the power of having rather too much her own way, and a
disposition to think a little too well of herself; these were the disadvantages which threatened alloy [=
impairment] to her many enjoyments. The danger, however, was at present so unperceived, that they did not
by any means rank as misfortunes with her.
Clearly, this is said in a judgmental tone, and whatever else may be entailed by the summary
characterization of Emma it is not an entirely positive one. Note that the narrator contrasts Emma's
conscious thoughts and views with something she is not conscious of.
1.28. (Emma, continued.) The paragraphs following the preceding passage now move from plain
exposition of background information (often using sentences cast in the past perfect tense) to a
presentation of more concrete events and action (cast in the simple past, the novel's basic narrative
tense). The novel's action proper begins on the evening of Miss Taylor's wedding day, an event which
causes a major change of state in the affairs of the protagonists.
Sorrow came – a gentle sorrow – but not at all in the shape of any disagreeable consciousness – Miss
Taylor married. It was Miss Taylor's loss which first brought grief. It was on the wedding-day of this beloved
friend that Emma first sat in mournful thought of any continuance. The wedding over and the bride-people
gone, her father and herself were left to dine together, with no prospect of a third to cheer a long evening. Her
father composed himself to sleep after dinner, as usual, and she had then only to sit and think of what she had
lost.
The event had every promise of happiness for her friend. Mr Weston was a man of unexceptionable
character, easy fortune, suitable age and pleasant manners; and there was some satisfaction in considering
with what self-denying, generous friendship she had always wished and promoted the match; but it was a
black morning's work for her. The want of Miss Taylor would be felt every hour of every day. She recalled
her past kindness – the kindness, the affection of sixteen years – how she had taught and how she had played
with her from five years old – how she had devoted all her powers to attach and amuse her in health – and
how nursed her through the various illnesses of childhood. A large debt of gratitude was owing here; but the
intercourse of the last seven years, the equal footing and perfect unreserve which had soon followed Isabella's
marriage on their being left to each other, was yet a dearer, tenderer recollection. It had been a friend and
companion such as few possessed, intelligent, well-informed, useful, gentle, knowing all the ways of the
[14]
family, interested in all its concerns, and peculiarly interested in herself, in every pleasure, every scheme of
her's; – one to whom she could speak every thought as it arose, and who had such an affection for her as could
never find fault.
How was she to bear the change? – It was true that her friend was going only half a mile from them; but
Emma was aware that great must be the difference between a Mrs Weston only half a mile from them, and a
Miss Taylor in the house; and with all her advantages, natural and domestic, she was now in great danger of
suffering from intellectual solitude. She dearly loved her father, but he was no companion for her. He could
not meet her in conversation, rational or playful.
First of all, the knowledge privilege now exhibited by the narrator confirms that this is a heterodiegetic
narrative situated in a typical authorial narrative situation (as you surely suspected from the
beginning). There is no experiencing-I in the action, and a first-person narrator would have no way of
knowing how Emma spent her time on the evening of that particular day.
1.29. More importantly, however, as you go through the text, you will (hopefully) notice a gradual
development and shift in narrative orientation. Try to put your finger on it. First of all, the text begins
to focus on single, concrete events. Whereas at the beginning of the novel we were given summary
accounts of large-scale events (Emma's mother's death etc), we are now situated in the middle of an
ongoing action sequence. Does this development go hand in hand with what we have previously
identified as 'internal focalization'? Of course, we could easily apply Toolan's FID/IF test questions. Is it
the narrator who, reader-friendly and duty-bound as she is, informs us of the fact that "The event had
every promise of happiness for [Miss Taylor]"? In other words, is this an important piece of factual
information she wants us to know? Or is there an alternative reading? Next, who is the source of the
text's reference to "all her [Emma's] advantages, natural and domestic" – the narrator? (Remember
the narrator's earlier comment about the "unperceived" disadvantages and dangers of Emma's
situation, and that Emma had a tendency to think "a little too well of herself".) Again, who is a likely
source for the judgment that "her father [...] was no companion for her. He could not meet her in
conversation, rational or playful" – the narrator? And what difference does it make if it were not the
narrator?
We can sum up the whole of the previous line of questioning by asking, how many voices does
Austen's text project? And what are the consequences? Watch out, these are loaded questions, and
they come with a host of interpretive implications (which is, of course, exactly what we need).
"Emma is the climax of Jane Austen's genius and the Parthenon of fiction" (Ronald Blythe, Introduction
to the Penguin edition). OTT as it is, support Blythe's judgment by showing two things: (1) that the
text is entirely modern in its anticipation of a modern narrative technique; (2) that the global narrative
design of the novel is effectively implied and established right at the beginning (you'll have to
speculate a bit on what the novel is going to be about).
Hopefully you are tending towards the following answers. We are beginning to hear two voices, that of
an authorial narrator and that of Emma, often both in one sentence. The figural elements of the text
show the beginnings of the historical move towards the figural narrative situation, to be properly
invented roughly 100 years later. In the novel, Emma will learn, from experience and mistakes, how to
acquire better judgment and how to make better decisions. Have a look at David Lodge's skillful
disentangling of the two voices (Lodge 1992: 5-6):
Jane Austen's opening is classical: lucid, measured, objective, with ironic implication concealed beneath
the elegant velvet glove of the style. How subtly the first sentence sets up the heroine for a fall. . .
"Handsome" (rather than conventionally pretty or beautiful . . .), "clever" (an ambiguous term for
intelligence, sometimes applied derogatively, as in "too clever for her own good") and "rich", with all its
biblical and proverbial associations of the moral dangers of wealth; these three adjectives, so elegantly
combined (a matter of stress and phonology – try rearranging them) encapsulate the deceptiveness of
Emma's "seeming" contentment. . . [I]nterestingly enough, we begin to hear the voice of Emma herself in
the discourse, as well as the judicious, objective voice of the narrator . . . we seem to hear Emma's own,
rather self-satisfied description of her relationship with her governess, one which allowed her to do "just
what she liked".
1.30. Finally, here is another incipit, this time from Raymond Chandler's The High Window, first
published 1943. Write down a protocol of your reading experience; pay particular attention to your
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understanding (or non-understanding) of the narrative situation as it evolves from sentence to
sentence. The bracketed note numbers in the text refer to the "questions and hints" section below.
Chapter One
THE house was on Dresden Avenue in the Oak Knoll section of Pasadena, a big solid cool-looking[1] house
with burgundy brick walls, a terra-cotta tile roof, and a white stone trim. The front windows were leaded
downstairs. Upstairs windows were of the cottage type and had a lot of rococo imitation stonework trimming
around them.
From the front wall and its attendant flowering bushes a half-acre or so of fine green lawn[2] drifted in a
gentle slope down to the street, passing on the way an enormous deodar[3] around which it flowed like a cool
green tide around a rock. [...] There was a heavy scent of summer on the morning and everything that grew
was perfectly still in the breathless air they get over there on what they call a nice cool day.[4]
All I knew about the people[5] was that they were a Mrs Elizabeth Bright Murdock and family and that she
wanted to hire a nice clean private detective who wouldn't drop cigar ashes on the floor and never carried
more than one gun.[6] And I knew she was the widow of an old coot with whiskers named Jasper Murdock
who had made a lot of money helping out the community, and got his photograph in the Pasadena paper every
year on his anniversary, with the years of his birth and death underneath, and the legend: His Life Was His
Service.[7]
I left my car on the street and walked over a few dozen stumbler stones set into the green lawn, and rang
the bell in the brick portico under a peaked roof.[8]
Questions and hints:
1. "Cool-looking", it might be argued, is part of a textual isotopy (a network of semantically
related concepts, see P3.6 if you want). Underline the other occurrences, repetitions, phrases
related in meaning.
2. What note is struck by indicating the size of somebody's lawn in acres?
3. "Deodar" – had to look it up, it's an "East Indian cedar", Webster's Collegiate says. What does
that tell you, I mean, not about me, about the narrator?
4. "They" – as in "us and them"?
5. What is your intuition here – narrating-I, experiencing-I, or self-reference of an authorial
narrator?
6. That may be what she wanted, but was it what she got?
7. Any comment on projected attitude, tone, etc?
8. It certainly took a while, but now the text's narrative situation is finally firmly established. Why
did the narrator do it the way he did? By way of experiment, what would one have to do to
transpose ("transvocalize", Genette would say) this passage into a figural narrative? It is
absurdly simple: change four words and it is done... [A. change the first-person pronouns to third.]
1.31. Here is a survey of the main features of the incipits discussed in this section.
Narrative Situation
(Stanzel)
Salinger: "If you really
want to hear about it
..." 1.3
Cozzens: "The
snowstorm, which
began at dawn ..." 1.8
neutral (unobtrusively
authorial)3
Stanzel (1955: 28) briefly toyed with the concept of 'neutral narration', but this was equivalent to the
heterodiegetic-covert mode rather than to the heterodiegetic-weakly-overt voice that characterizes the Cozzens
passage. As a matter of fact, after two introductory paragraphs, Cozzens' text shifts gears, introduces an internal
focalizer and proceeds in the mode of standard figural narration. See also 3.3.11 .
Drabble: "My career
has always been
marked ..." 1.12
standard first-person
autobiographical
Eliot: "With a single
drop of ink the
Egyptian ..." 1.14
authorial (standard
19C pattern)
Hemingway: "He lay
flat on the pine-
needled ..." 1.16
figural (standard 20C
pattern)
Huxley: "Along this
particular stretch of
the line ..." 1.21 , 1. 24
Austen: "Emma
Woodhouse,
handsome, clever, ..."
1.27
dynamic: authorial
exposition and some
internal focalization
Chandler: "The house
was on Dresden
avenue ..." 1.30
Exercise. Pick some novels or short stories yourself and analyze them by working through the catalog
of questions available via the toolbox. You could invite friends, let them bring some novels and do the
whole thing as a group exercise, or a quiz ...
1.32. Outline of major concepts introduced so far.
A. Narrative voice 1.3
1) Who speaks? 1.3 , 1.18
2) expressivity markers, 1.4
3) overt/covert voice distinction, 1.9
4) how to hide a voice, 1.9 , 1.17
B. Internal focalization 1.16 , 1.24
1) Who sees? 1.18
2) internal focalizer/reflector, 1.18
3) FID/IF test 1.23, 1.24, 8.6
C. Basic types and typical narrative situations
1) Genette's basic types
a) homodiegetic, 1.10 , 1.20
b) heterodiegetic, 1.10 , 1.21, 1.28
2) Stanzel's narrative situations (3. 3.1)
a) first-person, 1.11
b) authorial, 1.13 , 1.20
c) figural, 1.18, 1.20 , 1.26
1.33. This is the end of the Getting Started section, and I am sorry to say that the rest of this
document is much rougher going – one definition will simply chase another. Remember that being able
to identify whether text X is homodiegetic or heterodiegetic, or authorial or figural, or what not, is fine,
but not much. What is really important is that these concepts come with a whole infrastructure of
assumptions, expectations, implications, and, above all, questions. The following is a rough template of
possible questions.
A. Questions regarding narrative situation
1. What is the text's major narrative situation? Or does it use several narrative situations? If so,
what is the pattern or strategy behind the juxtaposition of several narrative situations?
[17]
2. Does the text stand in the tradition of certain other texts? Or does it deviate in certain respects
from the stylistic norm, perhaps to the extent that it originates a new pattern?
B. Questions focusing on the narrator
1. Who does the author choose for a speaker? Does s/he have a name and/or a distinctive voice?
Is the narrator overt or covert or somewhere in between? Is the voice quality different in
specific location such as (chapter) beginnings and endings?
2. Does the narrator make any assumptions about actual or potential addressees? Is there a clear-
cut narrator-audience contract? Is the extent of the narrator's (human) limitation or
omniscience ever discussed or problematized?
3. Is the narrator largely reliable or does s/he deceive him- or herself or others? Does his or her
unreliability concern value judgments or facts?
4. If the text were 'transvocalized', ie , narrated by another narrator and in a different narrative
situation, which effects would be gained, which lost? (See Stanzel 1984: ch3.1 for examples,
including the beginning of The Catcher in the Rye.)
C. Questions regarding focalization
1. Does the narrator use none, one, or many story-internal focalizers? If the latter, to establish
which point? In first-person narration, to what extent is the experiencing-I used as an internal
focalizer?
2. How accurate are the perceptions and thoughts of the focalizers, and to what extent are they
fallible filters (Chatman)? Does the narrator ever comment on the focalizer's perception from a
superordinate perspective?
3. If there are several focalizers (multiperspectival narration), do their various perceptions
contradict or corroborate those of other focalizers?
4. Is the general attitude of the narrator one of sympathy/empathy towards his or her focalizer?
Are the focalizer's perceptions and thoughts reported consonantly or dissonantly (ironically)?
Hopefully, the narratological concepts introduced in this section will act like analytical tools that enable
you to say because because because... And that is good because, ultimately, being able to say
"because" is what theory and essay writing is all about (Aczel 1998b: 49).
2. The narratological framework
Luckily we can boil the vastly complex field of narratology down to the question "Who narrates what
how?" This allows us to make use of the following multi-part mind map (underlined items clickable).
Fig. 2. WHO narrates WHAT HOW?
On the text-external level, WHO is the author; on the text-internal level, WHO is the narrator (2.3.1 ).
Narrators come in two types, homodiegetic and heterodiegetic (telling first-person and third-person
stories, respectively). WHAT do narrators do? They narrate or tell a story. Stories are made up of
[18]
characters, things, and events. Events have a chronological and a causal order (plot). The HOW of
narrative 'discourse' is determined by choice of tense (past? present?), speed (slow? normal? fast?),
event ordering (chronological? non-chronological?), and point of view (internal focalization? external
focalization?).
Note that our mind map can be vastly enriched by adding further question-words or phrases. For
instance, we could ask Who tells what TO WHOM (the target audience: adult readers? children?); WHY
(entertainment? education? argument?); TO WHAT EFFECT (laughter? tears?); IN WHICH SITUATION?
(courtroom? doctor's office? political rally?), and so on. Widening the field in this manner is actively
pursued by much of recent narratological research. Note, too, that the terms listed here, especially
'narrator' and 'discourse', relate mainly to verbally told stories. Once the scope is expanded to
encompass genres like comic strip, film, drama, opera, radio play etc many of the concepts used above
need to be revised and adapted – a task that has yet to be accomplished.
2.1. Background and basics
2.1.1. As a discipline, narratology began to take shape in 1966, the year in which the French journal
Communications published a special issue entitled "The structural analysis of narrative", which is still a
good working definition of narratology. The term narratology itself was coined three years later, by one
of the contributors to that special issue, Tzvetan Todorov (1969: 9):
• narratology: the theory of the structures of narrative. To investigate a structure, or to present
a 'structural description', the narratologist dissects the narrative phenomena into their
component parts and then attempts to determine functions and relationships.
Many narratologists today consider natural narratives such as occur in everyday conversation to be
the most elemental and prototypical instance of storytelling. Natural storytelling is an event in which
the participants are flesh-and-blood persons engaged in direct communication. In contrast, in written
narratives neither narrator nor reader can see or hear the other. However, even for writers and
readers the absent party is usually evoked as an imaginary presence. Specifically, readers can re-
create a mental image of the narrator from lines of text. The idea that readers habitually re-create the
prototypical storytelling scenario of natural narratives is the main tenet of natural narratology as
proposed by Fludernik (1996). We made use of the natural narrative hypothesis in the Getting Started
section of this script (1 ), where one of our tasks was to abstract narrators' voices from written texts.
Ultimately, the roots of narratology, like the roots of all Western theories of fiction, go back to Plato's
(428-348 BC) and Aristotle's (384-322 BC) distinction between 'mimesis' (imitation) and 'diegesis'
(narration). Chatman (1990: ch7) uses these concepts to distinguish diegetic narrative genres (epic
narratives, novels, short stories) from mimetic narrative genres (plays, films, cartoons); most
commentators, however, follow Genette's (1980 [1972]: ch4; 1988 [1983]: 49) proposal that
narrative fiction is a 'patchwork' of both mimetic and diegetic parts, mainly to be divided into a
'narrative of words' (speech and dialogue) and a 'narrative of events' (1988 [1983]: 43).
2.1.2. Practically all theories of narrative distinguish between WHAT is narrated (the 'story') and HOW
it is narrated (the 'discourse'). Some theorists, among them Gérard Genette, opt for a narrow meaning
of the term 'narrative', restricting narratives to verbally narrated texts (Genette 1988 [1983]: 17);
others (Barthes 1975 [1966], Chatman 1990, Bal 1985) argue that anything that tells a story, in
whatever genre, constitutes a narrative. It is this latter view which is adopted here (see 2.2 for a fuller
diagram of narrative text types). On this basis, our main definitions are as follows:
• narrative: anything that tells or presents a story, be it by oral or written text, picture,
performance, or a combination of these. Narratives can be found in conversation, jokes, novels,
plays, films, comic strips, etc.
• story: a sequence of events involving characters. Events include both natural and non-natural
happenings (such as floods and car accidents). Characters get involved by being agents
(causers of events), patients or beneficiaries (being affected by events). Linguists further
make a useful distinction between verbs which signal willful ('volitional') acts (What does X do?
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– jump from a bridge, watch a show) and verbs which signal non-volitional acts or experiences
(What does X experience? – falling from a bridge, seeing an accident).
See Ryan (2006: 8) for a much more detailed definition of narrative listing eight "conditions of
narrativity". In critical practice, 'events' and 'action' are often used synonymously. However, see
Schmid (2010: ch1) for a stricter differentiation between general 'happenings' and story-relevant
'events' (defined as unexpected and unprecedented incidents).
2.1.3. According to the Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure (the very founding-father of
structuralism), any sign consists of a 'signifier' and a 'signified' – basically, a tangible form or
substance and a non-tangible meaning. For a narrative text – a complex sign – the signifier is a
'discourse' (a mode of presentation) and the signified is a 'story' (an action sequence). Hence,
narratological investigation usually pursues one of two basic orientations:
• discourse narratology: analyzes the stylistic choices that determine the form or realization of
a narrative text (or performance, in the case of films and plays). Also of interest are the
pragmatic features that contextualize text or performance within the social and cultural
framework of a narrative act.
• story narratology: focuses on the action units that 'emplot' and arrange a stream of events
into a trajectory of themes, motives and plot lines (Bremond 1970, Prince 1982, Pavel 1985a,
Ryan 1991). The notion of emplotment plays a crucial role in the work of theorists like the
historian Hayden White (1996 [1981]) and cultural philosophers such as Paul Ricoeur (1991)
and Michel Foucault.
Further on the story/discourse distinction see Jakobson (1970 – French terms enoncé and
enonciation), Dolezel (1973: Introduction); Sacks et al. (1974 – narrative vs conversational turns);
Culler (1975a); Chatman (1978: ch1); Genette (1989 [1972]: 164-69; Genette (1988: 18, 61-62,
130); Lintvelt (1981: ch4.6.2); Bal (1983 [1977]); Fludernik (1993: ch1.5 – survey of story and
discourse models); Schmid (2010: chV).
2.1.4. Classical narratology. The main tenets of discourse narratology are well presented in the
writings of Stanzel, Chatman, Cohn, Genette, Bal, Rimmon-Kenan, Lintvelt, and Fludernik. Most of the
monographs published in narratology's classical period – the nineteen seventies and eighties – are still
good introductions to the field, especially Genette (1980 [1972]), Chatman (1978), Cohn (1978),
Sternberg (1993 [1978]), Todorov (1981), Prince (1982), Stanzel (1984), and Bal (1985). Particularly
useful are Rimmon-Kenan's (1983, revised edition 2002) concise survey, Prince's (1987, revised ed.
2003) dictionary of terms, Onega and Garcia Landa's (1996) reader (containing reprints of many
foundational essays), the critical surveys by O'Neill (1994) and Nelles (1997), and the linguistically
oriented discussions and exercises in Toolan (2001).
2.1.5. More recent variants of postclassical narratology are discussed in D. Herman, ed. (1999) and
L. Herman and Vervaeck (2005), Alber and Fludernik (2010). Today's narratological branches include
(among others) psychoanalytic narratology (Brooks 1984), historiographic narratology (Cohn 1999),
possible worlds narratology (Ryan 1991; 1998; Ronen 1994; Gutenberg 2000), legal narratology
(Brooks and Gewirtz, eds. 1996); feminist narratology (Warhol 1989; Lanser 1992; Mezei, ed. 1996),
gender studies narratology (Nünning and Nünning eds 2004), cognitive narratology (Perry 1979,
Sternberg 1993 [1978], Jahn (1997), natural narratology (Fludernik 1996), postmodernist narratology
(McHale 1987, 1992; Currie 1998), rhetorical narratology (Phelan 1996, Kearns 1999), cultural studies
narratology (Nünning 2000), transgeneric narratology (Nünning and Nünning, eds 2002, Hühn 2004),
political narratology (Bal, ed 2004), and psychonarratology (Bortolussi and Dixon 2003 [empirical
approach]). See Ionescu (2019) for a fuller survey of postclassical developments.
Current researchers emphasize the openness of the discipline, particularly vis à vis linguistics
(Fludernik 1993a), cognitive science (Duchan et al 1995), artificial intelligence (Ryan 1991) and
pragmatics (Pratt 1977; Adams 1996). For an encyclopedic survey of approaches and trends in modern
and ancient narrative theory see the Routledge Encyclopedia of Narrative Theory (Herman, Jahn, Ryan,
eds 2005). For a massive (1712 pp.) collection of foundational essays see Bal, ed. (2004 – vol. 1:
Major Issues in Narrative Theory; vol. 2: Special Topics; vol. 3: Political Narratology; vol. 4
Interdisciplinarity). Recent studies include Abbott (2002), a dedicated transgeneric approach
[20]
containing chapters on "narrative and life" (ch 1), narrative rhetoric, cultural masterplots (ch4),
closure (chs 5, 12), "overreading and underreading" (ch7), David Herman (2002), an investigation of
the cognitive, stylistic, and linguistic basics of narratology; Marie-Laure Ryan, ed. (2004), a collection
of essays on cross- and transmedial forms such as pictures, music, cinema, and computer games,
more recently continued in Ryan (2006) (ch I: Narrative in Old Media, ch II: Narrative in New Media).
Leech and Short (2007) demonstrate a linguistic approach. New general introductions in Fludernik
(2009) and Schmid (2010). Narratologia, published by de Gruyter, is a series of full-length studies (the
current (2020) volume count stands at 70).
2.1.6. Internet sources
• NARRNET, the European Narratology Network, a website maintained by the U of Hamburg,
Germany. Among the services offered are an extensive bibliography, a list of researchers,
current projects, events, links, and discussion forums.
• LHN: The Living Handbook of Narratology. A part of NARRNET, LHN is a dynamically updated
and collection of "articles on concepts and theories fundamental to narratology and to the
study of narrative in general". All entries can be downloaded as PDF docs.
• ISSN, the International Society for the Study of Narrative, organizes huge annual conferences.
Browsing is free but membership requires a subscription to the journal Narrative.
• ENN, the European Narratology Network, hosts bi-annual conferences and provides links to
various resources. Membership is free.
Note that the conference programs published by ISSN and ENN are excellent pointers to up-to-date
research interests and developments.
2.2. Narrative genres
2.2.1. So far we have only alluded to just a few representative forms of narrative. But arguably,
narrative has a far wider scope. Consider the famous list submitted by Roland Barthes (from his
seminal contribution in Communications 8, mentioned in 2. 1.1, above):
There are countless forms of narrative in the world. First of all, there is a prodigious variety of
genres, each of which branches out into a variety of media, as if all substances could be
relied upon to accommodate man's stories. Among the vehicles of narrative are articulated
language, whether oral or written, pictures, still or moving, gestures, and an ordered mixture of
all those substances: narrative is present in myth, legend, fables, tales, short stories, epic
history, tragedy, drame [suspense drama], comedy, pantomime, paintings (in Santa
Ursula by Carpaccio, for instance), stained-glass windows, movies, local news,
conversation. Moreover, in this infinite variety of forms, it is present at all times, in all
places, in all societies; indeed narrative starts with the very history of mankind; there is not,
there has never been anywhere, any people without narrative; all classes, all human groups,
have their stories, and very often those stories are enjoyed by men of different and even
opposite cultural backgrounds [...]. (Barthes 1975 [1966]: 237; my emphases)
In this passage I have highlighted not only the individual types of narrative but also the various terms
used by Barthes for the 'forms' themselves – 'genres', 'media', 'substances', and 'vehicles'. Here is a
taxonomy which imposes a kind of order on Barthes's list.
[21]
Fig. 3. A taxonomy of narrative genres.
Obviously, this diagram is not exhaustive but it does list representative and typical genres. Actually, it
might be a good idea to assume that each tree node has an additional branch leading to an implicit
"Other" category, and that this may serve as an empty slot that can be filled with any new category
that might come up (this is the way Chatman 1990: 115 handles it). If you come across a genre not
accounted for by aby branch of the tree – radio plays? hypertext narratives? comic strips? – try fitting
it in as best as is possible (or maybe the tree needs to be modified). Note that some forms occur more
than once – eg check the nodes allotted to poems and plays.
2.2.2. As noted above, narratology is concerned with all types of narratives, literary and nonliterary,
verbal and nonverbal. One major distinction that is usually made is that between fictional and
nonfictional narratives:
• A fictional narrative presents an imaginary narrator's account of a story that happened in an
imaginary world. A fictional narrative is appreciated for its entertainment and educational value,
possibly also for providing a vision of characters who might exist or might have existed, and a
vision of things that might happen or could have happened. Although a fictional narrative may
freely refer to actual people, places and events, it cannot be used as evidence of what
happened in the real world.
• A nonfictional narrative (also factual narrative) presents a real-life person's account of a
real-life story. Unless there are reasons for questioning an author's credibility, a factual
narrative can serve as evidence of what happened in the real world. In principle, the author of a
factual narrative is accountable for the truth of its statements and can always be asked How do
you know?
Because of the systematic relatedness of these concepts, many factual narratives such as
historiographic texts or biographies have fictional counterparts (historiographic fiction, fictional
biographies, etc) (Cohn 1999). On the notion of panfictionality (= no matter how factual, every
narrative involves a narrator's imagination, hence is fiction) see Ryan (1997b).
2.2.3. Here is an incomplete list of various narrative themes and genres.
• narratives of personal experience (also called personal experience narrative: PEN):
Labov's (1972) famous analysis of a corpus of stories based on interview questions such as
"Were you ever in a situation where you were in serious danger of being killed?".
• biblical narratives: Kermode (1979); Sternberg (1985); Bal (1987, 1988).
• teacher's narratives: Cortazzi (1993).
• children's narratives: Applebee (1978); Branigan (1992: 18-19).
[22]
• medical narratives (doctors/patients): Hunter (1993), Gülich (2020)
• family narratives: Flint (1988); Jonnes (1990); Style 31.2 (1997) [special issue, ed. John
Knapp].
• courtroom narratives/legal narratives: Brooks and Gewirtz, eds. (1996); Posner (1997)
• prison narratives: Fludernik and Olson, eds. (2004)
• historiographic autobiography/fictional autobiography: Lejeune (1989); Cohn (1999:
ch2); Löschnigg (1999).
• hypertext narratives: Ryan (1997a)
• musical narratives: McClary (1997); Wolf (1999); Kafalenos (2004)
• filmic narratives: Kozloff (1988); Chatman (1978; 1990); Bordwell (2004), see also this
project's film page pppf.pdf
• mental (or 'internal') narratives: Schank (1995); Ricoeur (1991); Turner (1996); Jahn
(2003)
2.3. Narrative communication
2.3.1. As we have already shown in the Getting Started section (1.6), 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').
Fig. 4. Levels of narrative communication (again).
This model distinguishes between the levels of action, fictional communication or 'mediation', and
nonfictional communication, and establishes useful points of reference for key terms like author ,
reader, narrator, and narratee/addressee (for a book-length study on communication in narrative see
Coste 1989; for the pragmatic status of narrative statements Hamburger 1977 and Genette 1991).
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 communication (or 'mediation', or 'narrative discourse'),
where a fictional first-person narrator named Harry tells the fishing-boat picture story to an unnamed
addressee or 'narratee' (for an argument that Harry might be his own narratee see 9.1 ). 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 we are assuming that speech acts (Austin 1962 [1955],
Searle 1974 [1969]) are not categorically different from other acts.
[23]
2.3.2. Some theorists add another intermediate level of implied fictional communication (a level below
the author-reader level) comprising an implied author (a text's projection of an overarching
intratextual authority above the narrator) and an implied reader (a text's overall projection of a
reader role, superordinate to any intratextual narratee). The main reason for implementing this level is
to account for unreliable narration (7.6 ). See Booth (1961), Chatman (1990) [one proposing and the
other defending the concept]; Fieguth (1973); Iser (1971, 1972, 1976) [on readers and 'implied
readers']; Bal (1981b: 209), Genette (1988 [1983]: ch19) [for critical discussion], Nünning (1993),
and Kindt and Müller (1999)
2.3.3. Following the reception-oriented model proposed by Rabinowitz (1987), many narratologists
differentiate between the stipulated belief systems/interpretive strategies of 'authorial' vs. 'narrative'
audiences:
• authorial audience: the audience of real readers addressed by the author.
• narrative audience: the fictional audience addressed by the narrator. The term covers both
named or otherwise explicitly specified 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.
The two kinds of audiences are rarely the same. In particular, readers have to decide whether they
should or should not adopt the narrative audience's presuppositions as projected by or reflected in the
narrator's discourse. See Prince (1980) for the first major account of the narratee (on which Genette
commented, "I would willingly and unashamedly annex that article", 1988: 131), Rabinowitz (1987),
Phelan (1996) and Kearns (1999) for further elaboration and application of the audience concepts.
2.3.4. Although the terms person, character and figure are often used indiscriminately, narratologists
often try to infuse a greater degree of precision by making the following distinction.
• A person is a real-life person; anyone occupying a place on the level of nonfictional
communication. Authors and readers are persons.
• 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 on the level of action. Example:
the character Harry in Sillitoe's "The Fishing Boat Picture".
• The term figure is often simply used as a variation of 'character'; however, some theorists also
usefully employ it to refer to the narrator. For instance, it is correct to say that the first-person
narrator in Sillitoe's story is a 'narrator figure'.
2.3.5. Metalepsis, a transgression of levels. Normally, the levels of action, fictional mediation, and
nonfictional communication (as shown in the graphic of 2. 3.1) are hermetically sealed domains
indicating crucial thresholds of control and awareness. Any agent situated on a higher-level dominates
and frames all lower-level agents, while lower-level agents are unaware of the existence of the higher-
level agents. For instance, the characters at the level of action do not know that they are characters in
some narrator's story, and they cannot complain if their acts or motives are misrepresented by this
narrator. Similarly, a narrator such as Holden Caulfield is not aware of the fact that he is a fictional
figure in the novel written by J.D. Salinger (point spelled out in more detail in 1.6 ).
Occasionally, however, one finds some playful and not-so-playful transgressions of levels, which
Genette calls 'metalepses' (Genette 1980 [1972]: 234-237). Typical cases cited in the literature are
(1) characters attempting to establish communicative contact with either audience or author or vice
versa (see the device of the 'aside ad spectatores' in drama and film, also actors 'acting out of
character'), and (2) narrators and narratees seemingly joining the characters in the action. Examples:
Once again Gold found himself preparing to lunch with someone – Spotty Weinrock – and the thought arose
that he was spending an awful lot of time in this book eating and talking. . . Certainly he would soon meet a
school-teacher with four children with whom he would fall madly in love, and I would hold shortly out to him
the tantalizing promise of becoming the country's first Jewish Secretary of State, a promise I did not intend to
keep. (Joseph Heller, Good as Gold , qtd Lodge 1992: 22)
[24]
You shall see them, reader. Step into this neat garden-house on the skirts of Whinbury, walk forward into the
little parlour – there they are at dinner. [...] You and I will join the party, see what is to be seen, and hear what
is to be heard. (Charlotte Brontë, Shirley 9)
Clearly, a metalepsis can either be playful and harmlessly metaphorical (as in the Brontë text) or else
(as in the Heller) a serious transgression violating the "sacred frontier between two worlds, the world
in which one tells, the world of which one tells" (Genette 1980 [1972]: 236) – in other words, the
domain of the discourse and the domain of the story. See D. Herman (1997) for a formal description of
metalepsis and Malina (2000) for an in-depth exploration of functions, effects, and types of
'reconstructive', 'deconstructive', 'subversive', and 'transformative' metalepses. See Pier (2016) for a
recent overview.
Related phenomena include alterations (3. 3.15), the alienation effect in drama (D6.1), the device goof
in film (F5.3.3), and parabasis in classical rhetoric (the latter term referring to a character directly
addressing the audience).
2.4. Narrative Levels
2.4.1. Story-telling can occur on many different levels. As Barth (1984 [1981]) puts it, there may be
"tales within tales within tales". The model presented in 2.3.1 , above, provides a general framework
which can easily be adapted to more complex circumstances. One such circumstance arises when a
character in a story begins to tell a story of his or her own, creating a narrative within a narrative, a
tale within a tale. The original narrative now becomes a 'frame' or 'matrix' narrative, and the story told
by the narrating character becomes an 'embedded narrative' or 'hyponarrative' (Bal 1981a: 43):
• A matrix narrative is a narrative containing an embedded 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, the transition to a hyponarrative, the
termination of the hyponarrative, and the return to the matrix narrative are explicitly signaled
in a text; occasionally, however, a text may close on a hyponarrative without explicitly
resuming the matrix narrative (see example in subgraphic [c] below). One could call this a
dangling matrix narrative. The somewhat rarer opposite to this would be an uninitialized
hyponarrative (postmodernist example: Agota Kristof, The Notebook [1986]).
2.4.2. For a fairly logical and hence recommended analysis of embedded narratives, Rimmon-Kenan
(1983: 91) suggests the following terms:
• A first-order/first-degree narrative is a narrative that is not embedded in any other
narrative; a second-order/second-degree narrative is a narrative that is embedded in a
first-or der narrative; a third-order/third-degree narrative is one that is embedded in a
second-order narrative, etc.
• A first-order/first-degree narrator, by analogy, is the narrator of a first-order narrative, a
second-order narrator is the narrator of a second-order narrative, etc, in exact correspondence.
See Genette (1980 [1972]: 228-234; 1988 [1983]: ch14) [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: ch3); Nelles (1997: ch 5);
Pier (2014).
2.4.3. Here are three popular ways of depicting embedded narratives.
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Fig. 5. Embedded narrators and narratives.
In (a) first-order narrator Jim narrates first-order narrative A. In narrative A, second-order narrator
Joe tells second-order narrative B (adapted from Genette 1988 [1983]: 85). Graphics (b) and (c) are
so-called 'Chinese-boxes models' which (theoretically) can be drawn to great accuracy, indicating both
the relative lengths of the different narratives as well as their potentially 'open' or 'closed' status
(Lintvelt 1978; Ryan 1991: 178; Branigan 1992: 114). In example (b), A is a first-order narrative, B1
and B2 are second-order narratives, and C is a third-order narrative. (Question: which of these are
(also) matrix narratives? Answer: A and B2.) Example (c) illustrates the embedding structure of Henry
James's The Turn of the Screw, which ends on the conclusion of the Governess's third-order narrative
without returning to either of its two superordinate narratives.
There are a number of texts that are famous for their multiple embeddings: The Arabian Nights,
Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, Jan Potocki's Saragossa Manuscript, Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights ,
John Barth's "Menelaiad". See also Chatman (1978: 255-257), Barth (1984 [1981]), Ryan (1991:
ch9), Baker (1992).
2.4.4. As an exercise, work out the following problems. Some may be a bit tricky; use simple Chinese-
boxes to argue your answers.
1. Can a hyponarrative be a matrix narrative?
2. Can a matrix narrative be a hyponarrative?
3. Must a first-order narrative be a matrix narrative?
4. Can a text have more than one first-order narrative?
5. Can a character be a first-order narrator?
6. Can a character be both a second-order narrator and a third-order narrator?
[Answers. 1. Sure. 2. Absolutely. 3. Nope. 4. Yes: Dickens, Bleak House. 5. No! On what level do we get
characters? (2.3.1). 6. No prob.]
2.4.5. 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 is framed or one that is or provides a frame? Note that, on occasion a narrative can be
both. With reference to graphic (a) in 2.4.3, 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.
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Although the hypo- concept is a useful one, linking hypodiegetic narrators to hypo-hyponarratives is
awkward. More drawbacks of the nomenclature become apparent when one tries to tackle the
problems set in 2. 4.4.
2.4.6. Embedded narratives can serve one or several of the following functions:
• actional integration: the hyponarrative serves as an important element in the plot of the
matrix narrative. For instance, in The Arabian Nights 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.
• 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).
• 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 [1981]: 232).
2.4.7. Hyponarratives are also often used to create an effect of 'mise en abyme', a favorite feature of
postmodernist narratives (Dällenbach 1981; Ron 1987; McHale 1987: ch8; Wolf 1993). Figure 6 cites a
visual example.
• 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).
Fig. 6. A pictorial mise en abyme.
Spence (1987: 188) cites the following example:
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 and stormy night and . . .'"
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3. Narration, Focalization, and Narrative Situations
This section combines the theories of Gérard Genette (1980 [1972]; 1988 [1983]) and Franz K.
Stanzel (1982; 1984 [English transl.]). Additionally, it also considers various revisions and
modifications suggested by Chatman (1978, 1990), Lanser (1981), Lintvelt (1981), Cohn (1981,
1999), Bal (1985), Fludernik (1996, 2009), Schmid (2010). The best preparation for understanding the
key distinctions made here is to read the "Getting started" chapter of this script (1 ).
3.1. Narration (voice)
The term 'voice' metaphorically invokes one of the three grammatical categories of verb forms – the
others being tense and mood (Genette 1980 [1972]: 213). In terms of grammatical 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 by a text.
3.1.1. As regards the question Who speaks? Who is the text's narrative voice? we are going to use the
following definition of a narrator:
• 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' (1.5 ) of the story (Labov 1972) and comment on its lesson,
purpose, or message.
3.1.2. In Jakobson's terms, narratorial discourse (like any other discourse) can serve a variety of
'functions', mainly (a) an addressee-oriented 'phatic function' (maintaining contact with the
addressee), (b) an 'appellative function' (persuading the addressee to believe or do something), and
(c) an 'emotive' or 'expressive function' (expressing his/her own subjectivity). All of these functions
are indicative of a text's projection of narratorial voice (cp 1.4 ). See Jakobson (1960) for the discourse
functions; Fowler (1977) on the notion of a narrator's 'discoursal stance'; Bonheim (1982) on the
presence or absence of narratorial 'conative solicitude'; Chatman (1990) on narratorial 'slant' ("the
psychological, sociological and ideological ramifications of the narrator's attitudes, which may range
from neutral to highly charged" 1990: 143), and rhetorical approaches to narratorial discourse (Booth
1961, Phelan 1996, Kearns 1999).
3.1.3. Whatever you may think of 'political correctness' in general, interpretive discourse must decide
on how to gender a narrator grammatically, mainly because it would be stylistically awkward never to
use a pronoun at all. A generic 'he' is clearly out of the question, and the option suggested by Bal – "I
shall refer to the narrator as it, however odd this may seem" (1985: 119) – is not only extremly odd,
indeeed, but, as Ryan (1999: 141n17) points out, "incompatible with consciousness and linguistic
ability". By way of compromise, most scholars now follow what has become known as 'Lanser's rule':
• 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; ie, 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: ch1; Lanser 1995).
Hence the narrator of Dickens's Hard Times would be assumed to be male and referred to as "he",
while the narrator of Austen's Sense and Sensibility would be assumed to be female and referred to as
"she". See Culler (1988: 204-207) for a critique of the rule and for pointing out some interesting
ramifications. Problematic in Lanser's gendered pronouns are (1) that they may attribute a narrative
voice quality which is better left indeterminate, at least in certain cases (saying "narrative agency" and
"it" poses just the opposite problem, however); (2) that they establish a questionable author-narrator
link (cp 2.3.1 ).
[28]
The problem of sexually indeterminate narrators usually arises with authorial narrators (heterodiegetic
narrators) only. See Lanser (1995) and Fludernik (1999) for a discussion of sexually indeterminate
first-person narrators in Jeannette Winterson's Written on the Body and Maureen Duffy's Love Child.
3.1.4. 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
(Jakobson's 'expressive function'), one who 'intrudes' into the story in order to pass
philosophical or metanarrative comments, one who has a distinctive voice.
• 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 [1921]: 62; qtd Genette
1988 [1983]: 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 (3.2.2 ).
See 1.4 , above, for a list of typical 'voice markers' which, in addition to the pragmatic signals
discussed above, consider content matter and subjective expressions.
Obviously, overtness and covertness are relative terms, that is, narrators can be more or less overt,
and more or less covert. Usually (but not always) 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.
3.1.5. Following Genette, we will make a categorical distinction between two principal types,
homodiegetic and heterodiegetic narrators and narratives. The distinction is based on the narrator's
"relationship to the story" (1980 [1972]: 248) – ie , whether s/he is present or absent from the story.
To repeat from 1.10:
• In a homodiegetic narrative the (homodiegetic) narrator tells a story of personal experience.
In other words, he or she is also one of story's acting characters. A homodiegetic narrator
therefore splits up into a narrating-I (telling the story on the level of fictional communication)
and an experiencing-I (on the level of action).
• In a heterodiegetic narrative, the story is told by a (heterodiegetic) narrator who is not
present as a character in the story. A heterodiegetic narrator can have a narrating-I (using the
first person on the level of fictional communication) but s/he cannot have an experiencing-I.
Usually, the two types correlate with a text's use of first-person and third-person pronouns. To repeat
the rule of thumb mentioned in 1.11,
• 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;
• a text is heterodiegetic if all story-related action sentences are third-person sentences (She did
this, this was what happened to him).
3.1.6. 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, ie, sentences which
present an event involving the characters in the story. Note well that narrative texts make use of many
[29]
types of sentences which are not plain action sentences – descriptions, quotations, comments, etc
(1.11 ).
As Genette points out, the criterial feature of homodiegetic narration is whether the narrator was ever
present in the world of his/her story. The bare fact that homodiegetic narrators refer to themselves in
the first person is not an absolutely reliable criterion for two reasons: (1) overt heterodiegetic
narrators refer to themselves in the first person, too, and (2), more rarely though, there are some
homodiegetic narrators who refer to themselves in the third person (famous classical example is
Caesar's De Bello Gallico). See Tamir (1976); Genette (1980 [1972]: 245-247); Stanzel (1984: 79-
110, 200-224, 225-236), Edmiston (1991).
3.1.7. At this point, let us briefly return to the concept of voice. Of course, a voice can only enter into
a text through a reader's imaginary perception; hence, unless the text is an oral narrative in the first
place, or is performed in the context of a public reading, or is an audio text, voice is strictly a readerly
construct (Jahn 2001b ). In the classical narratological model, 'voice' is primarily associated with the
narrator's voice (this is also how we treated the topic in 1.3 ff). In 1.29, however, we were led to ask
how many voices were projected in a particular passage from Austen's Emma. Under the growing
impact of Mikhail Bakhtin's theory of narrative it is now standard practice to grant projection of voice
to characters as well as narrators. On this basis, then,
• textual or intratextual voices are those of the narrator (= the text's 'narrative voice') and
the characters; whereas
• 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 often the case in authorial narration (aptly named, as one can see)), also in
nonfictional, real-life, or historiographic narrative, 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.
3.1.8. Vocal characteristics can be profitably investigated by analyzing somebody's dialect (r egional
features, esp. pronunciation), sociolect (speech characteristics of a social group), idiolect (singular
or idiosyncratic style), and genderlect (the gender-specific style preferred by women and men,
respectively).
3.1.9. According to Bakhtin (1981a [1973]), 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, producing a
'monologic' text.
• 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.
3.1.10. 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 this context:
• 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.
• 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.
Genette (1980 [1972]: ch5) [voice = narrator's voice]; Bakhtin (1981a [1973]); Lanser (1981) [extra-
and (intra)textual voices]; Fowler (1983) [excellent analysis of polyphony and dialect/sociolect in
[30]
Dickens's Hard Times]; Fludernik (1993a: 324) [on heteroglossia]; Aczel (1998a) [voice and
intertextuality; voices in Henry James].
3.2. Focalization (point of view)
3.2.1. Genette's focalization
Adopting the term focalization, Genette sets out to explore the "different points of view from which
[...] the action is looked at" (1980: 161). Further definitional questions include "Who sees?", "Who
perceives?", "Who is the character whose point of view orients the narrative perspective?" (1980:
186), "Who serves as a text's center of orientation?", and, ultimately, "In what way is narrative
information restricted with respect to completeness of information or omniscience?" (1988: 74).
Although these prompts address different features – a text's alignment to a character's perception on
the one hand and the overall scope and restriction of 'narrative information' on the other – they are
easily combined using the following general definition.
• focalization: the selection and restriction of narrative information relative to somebody's
perception, knowledge, and point of view.
Surveying Western narrative fiction, Genette distinguishes three major types of focalization – zero
(unrestricted), internal (restricted to 'inside views', that is, views into or from within a character's
mind), and external (restricted to 'outside views'). Genette also distinguishes three arrangement
patterns – fixed, variable, and multiple focalization (3.2.5 ).
3.2.2. In non-focalization or zero focalization: the story's events are narrated from a wholly
unrestricted or omniscient point of view. Typical example: Henry Fielding's Tom Jones (1749) and
many other 18C and 19C heterodiegetic or authorial novels.
Here is an excerpt from a 20C novel, James A. Michener's Hawaii (1961).
Across a million years, down more than ten million years [the island] existed silently in the unknown sea and
then died, leaving only a fringe of coral where the birds rest and where gigantic seals of the changing ocean
play. Ceaseless life and death, endless expenditure of beauty and capacity, tireless ebb and flow and rising and
subsidence of the ocean. Night comes and the burning day, and the island waits, and no man arrives. The days
perish and the nights, and the aching beauty of lush valleys and waterfalls vanishes, and no man will ever see
them. (p. 9)
The passage exhibits a panoramic point of view encompassing huge vistas of space and time. The
narrator appears to have access to limitless information which transcends what is accessible to
ordinary humans. He lightly refers to a time span of "more than ten million years" and asserts that "no
man will ever see" the scenery's "aching beauty of lush valleys and waterfalls". To Genette's question
"Who sees" the expected, if slightly surprising, answer is nobody because no perceiving character is
present. To the question concerning the scope of narrative information the answer is no restriction, the
narrator is omniscient. Hence, according to Genette, the passage is nonfocalized. [But is it? (3.2.8 )]
3.2.3. In internal focalization the story's events are focalized through a story-internal character.
Narrative information is basically restricted to data available to this character's perception.
• focal character / reflector / reflector character: a character whose perception filters the
narrative.
The term reflector was introduced by Henry James, who also used center and mirror. Alternate terms
include focal character (Genette), figural medium (Stanzel), filter (Chatman), and internal focalizer
(Bal). The proliferation of terms is an indication of the importance of the concept and the immense
influence of the style.
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Using a reflector character produces a subjective and 'impressionistic' view of the storyworld. It makes
the reader co-experience what it is like to be in the head of somebody participating in the story's
events. Third-person internal focalization is basically identical to the figural narrative situation (3.3.4 ),
which, strictly speaking, wasn't invented until the early 20C period called 'modernism' (however, see
de Jong 2001 for a discussion of much earlier proto-forms such as in Homer around 1000 BC).
For a typical example reconsider the beginning of Hemingway's For Whom the Bell Tolls (1943)
(already qtd in the Getting Started section under the heading of figural narrative situation):
He lay flat on the brown, pine-needled floor of the forest, his chin on his folded arms, and high overhead the
wind blew in the tops of the pine trees. The mountainside sloped gently where he lay; but below it was steep
and he could see the dark of the oiled road winding through the pass. There was a stream alongside the road
and far down he saw a mill beside the stream and the falling water of the dam, white in the summer sunlight.
[To repeat some observations from 1. 10, the passage closely represents and follows the reflector
character's current perceptions – things he sees, feels, and hears ("he could see", the "pine-needled
floor", the "gently" sloping ground; the wind blowing "high overhead".) Note that all narrative
information is restricted and aligned to the reflector's current spatial and temporal co-ordinates. The
notable effect of this technique is that the reader is sucked into the story, invited to see the world just
as the character sees it, and co-experience what it is like to be a participant in the events. It is a
hugely successful stylistic device, and we squarely owe it and its many variations to Henry James,
James Joyce, and Virginia Woolf.]
Many modernist novels of 'literary impressionism' built stories around carefully chosen reflector
characters. These included seemingly everyday people such as Woolf's Clarissa Dalloway, an upper
middle-class mother and wife, and Joyce's Leopold Bloom, an advertisement canvasser. Other popular
reflector figures were intellectuals, artists, and children (Caracciolo/Guédon 2017), or characters
placed in exceptional circumstances. In Woolf's Mrs Dalloway (1925), one reflector is a shell-shocked
and suicidal schizophrenic; in Graham Greene's A Gun For Sale (1936), the reflector is a murderer;
and in Malcolm Lowry's Under the Volcano (1947) he is an alcoholic.
3.2.4. External focalization is a form of presentation that restricts itself to mere "outside views",
neutrally reporting what would be visible and audible to a virtual camera (plus sound recorder),
without any "inside views" into the minds of the characters. (In contrast, zero focalization freely allows
and internal focalization strictly depends on inside views.) Externally focalized narratives typically
consist of dialogue and "stage directions" only, as in the following often quoted beginning of
Hemingway's short story "The Killers" (1927).
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?"
"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.
[Not an entirely convincing example either? See 3.2.8 for an alternative approach.]
3.2.5. Genette additionally distinguishes three arrangement patterns. (1) Texts employing fixed
focalization are exclusively presented from the point of view of a single reflector as in Joyce's Portrait
of the Artist as a Young Man (1916). (2) Variable focalization occurs in narratives that employ
several reflectors (in Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway, events are variously seen through the eyes of six major
characters). (3) Multiple focalization (a special case of variable focalization) occurs in texts in which
the events are told two or more times, each time seen through a different reflector (Patrick White's
The Solid Mandala, detailed discussion in Jahn (2007), now excerpted in 9.3.
Genette also points out that focalization patterns can be static or dynamic along longer stretches of
text. Fixed internal focalization is a static pattern by definition, other patterns dynamically shift from
one type to another. For instance, Genette notes that many 19C novelists tend to introduce characters
[32]
via externally focalized block description before picking one of them as a reflector and presenting the
events from his or her point of view (1980: 190).
3.2.6. Two special cases of focalization have attracted some attention in the literature, so I will briefly
mention them here:
• hypothetical focalization: the representation of events or existents as they might have been
perceived by a hypothetical observer or virtual spectator. [Herman 1994; Edmiston 1991: 150-
9; Fludernik 1996: ch 5.3.] Example: "Perhaps the eye of a scrutinizing observer might have
discovered a barely perceptible fissure" (Poe, "The Fall of the House of Usher").
• empty center focalization: basically like internal focalization except there is no actual
reflector character present in the scene. Focalization in this case is assumed to proceed from
the point of view of an 'empty (deictic) center'. Banfield (1987 – discussion of the "Time
Passes" section of Woolf's To the Lighthouse); Fludernik (1996: ch5.2 – 'figuralization' in
Mansfield's "At the Bay")
3.2.7. Here is a selectively annotated list of references to the classical (Genettean) account: Genette
(1980 [1972]: 185-194 [building on Blin's (1954) concept of restriction de champ]); Bal (1983: 35-
38); Rimmon-Kenan (1983: 71-85); Nünning (1989: 41-60); Vitoux (1982); Cordesse (1988); Toolan
(1988: 67-76); Kablitz (1988); Edmiston (1989; 1991: Introduction and Appendix); Füger (1993);
O'Neill (1994: ch4); Herman (1994); Deleyto (1996 [1991]); Nelles (1997: ch3); Jahn (1996, 1999,
2007); Niederhoff (2013) [focalization=restriction, perspective=perception]; Herman (2009).
Focalization concepts have also been put to use in analyses of films (Jost 1989, Deleyto 1996 [1991],
Branigan 1992: ch4, Kuhn 2009), pictures (Bal 1985: ch7; Bal 1990), comic strips (O'Neill 1994: ch4) ,
and graphic novels (Hescher 2016). Controversial issues are discussed in Genette (1988 [1983]: ch11-
12), Chatman (1986), Bal (1991: ch6); Fludernik (1996: 343-347), Jahn (1996, 1999, 2007), Toolan
(2001), Prince (2001), Phelan (2001), Margolin (2009).
****************************************************
3.2.8. Constructivist focalization
The model presented in the following 20+ paras is an expansion of several earlier attempts (Jahn
1996, 1999, 2007). If, along with Genette, you believe the subject has caused "enough ink to flow"
(1988: 65) feel free to skip forward to 3.3 .
Why another account of focalization? Is anything wrong with the original model? Let us briefly review
some critical comments.
• If we associate a reflector character with the question "who sees?" and the narrator with the
question "who speaks?" it is easy to overlook that both can do both, ie, see and speak. Yet
Genette intends the division to be rigorous, in effect barring the narrator from being able to
see, both in the sense of "looking at the action" and in the wider sense of seeing something
from a point of view. This, many narratologists now think, is a major fault.
• Closely related to this, calling an authorial narrative 'nonfocalized' seriously begs the question.
Rather than suggesting no point of view, omniscience more likely rests on the authorial
narrator's license to assume any number of points of view, including some not normally
available in real life. Michener's text in 3.2.2 really proves the point.
• Regarding 'external focalization', as represented by the Hemingway text in 3.2.4, one does note
that the passage includes the rather telling sentence "Nick watched them". As a matter of fact,
the passage is easily read as a segment of internal focalization following Nick's attention and
interest focus – even if the text refrains from representing any of Nick's thoughts or emotions
directly. But we also have strategies for reading other people's minds by judging their actions
and reactions (see Zunshine 2006 on 'Theory of Mind'). "The Killers" is Nick's story of initiation
(3. 3.4 ), and in order for it to work we need to know what the character sees and experiences,
not what an objective camera, placed in an arbitrary location, happens to record.
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• While most of the examples cited by Genette refer to heterodiegetic texts, focalization is better
conceived of as pertaining to all narrative texts, specifically including first-person/homodiegetic
ones (Edmiston 1991). Actually, Genette (1988: 78) did propose the term 'prefocalization' to
account for homodiegetic texts, but that came as an afterthought only and has proved
inconsequential.
• 'Perception' is a key concept with regard to focalization, yet most of its psychological
underpinnings, especially its cognitive, emotional, and ideological conditioning is ignored in
Genette's account (Rimmon-Kenan 1983).
As will be shown in the following, it is not too difficult to act on the objections and suggestions listed
here – we'll get rid of nonfocalization, accept narrator-focalizers (Bal 1991), use a model that equally
applies to first-person and third-person texts, and treat perception as psychologically conditioned. In
doing so, we may not get all issues sorted, even introduce some problems of our own, but such is
theory. In the words of Walt Kelly, the author of the classic Pogo cartoons, it will be our aim here to
sprinkle some blossoms around and then run through the field barefooted in order to find out where
the thorns are.
3.2.9. I am labeling the model 'constructivist' because it builds on the assumption that we can never
perceive a thing X directly, let alone as "what it really is". Constructivists assume that seeing amounts
to creating a mental representation of the sensory input that our sense organs are capable of
recording, in effect allowing us to see a real X as a mental Y. 'Y' in this formula is a 'percept', a mental
representation that our mind is able to manipulate, store, and retrieve, as opposed to both the pure
'sense data' recorded by our senses, and also the world as it really is. As Stanley Fish and many
constructivists since have argued, humans – like all sentient organisms – have a 'shaping eye' that
needs to construct what it sees, and being able to see is a function not only of the perceptive
capabilities of the eye itself but of the interpretive mechanisms and strategies that an organism brings
to the task. Very simply and reductively put, we see (a) what our eyes are constitutionally capable of
seeing and (b) what we are interested in seeing. Note that natural perception is limited in several
ways. Thus, our eyes happen to be insensitive to either extremely small or extremely large objects,
such as objects on the atomic or the galactic scale. The deficiencies can be addressed by making use
of (or inventing) tools like the microscope and the telescope. Another, equally important, limiting
condition is that we may see sharp enough alright but simply not have the brains to see the relevant
shape or pattern, such as recognizing a medical symptom. In this case, the deficiency can be cured by
acquiring (learning) the interpretive strategy that enables us to do it. [Nünning (2001); Church (2000)
on 'seeing as'; Fish (1980: 333) on 'shaping eyes' and 'interpretive strategies'; Jackendoff (1983: ch8)
on 'preference rules'.]
Take the case of the common or garden frog, call him Kermit. Kermit's eyes are well suited to translate
certain external stimuli into the sense data that his brain is able to interpret. Kermit is particularly
interested in small, black, moving objects because these might be flies. Flies, he knows, are food, so
whenever he sees a small, black, moving object, he will hop to and try to catch it, errors having been
known to occur. Other things he largely ignores, except maybe females and competitors, for whom, I
am sure, he also has stock modes of perception and action. Kermit's perception, one can say, is driven
by a specially tuned mindset. Does this amount to saying that a frog's and a human's perceptive
mechanisms amount to the same thing? Indeed, the basic constructivist design seems to be just the
same. What difference there is lies less in the perceptive power of a frog's and a human's eyes than in
the different mindsets that drive us, and them. To Kermit, flies are food, to me they are not. If Kermit
sees X as Y, I am more likely to see X as Z, a fact that not only holds for frogs vs people, but also for
people vs people. There you go: this is the very phenomenon that our model seeks to theorize further.
Apart from its constructivist foundation, the present approach heavily borrows from some much earlier
accounts, especially Henry James's reflections on, and experiments in, perspectivized storytelling
(1881), William James's (1890) theory of subjectivity, and Karl Bühler's (1934) notion of a person's
spatio-temporal co-ordinate system.
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3.2.10. Because an act of perception can be cast as a sentence containing 'wh-words' as placeholders
the following multi-part mind map comes in handy for a first orientation.
Fig. 7. WHO perceives WHAT.
The WHO slot in this map identifies the perceiver or subject of perception; WHAT is the percept or
object of perception (also the Y in the seeing-X-as-Y formula or the thing/situation/event focused on).
For the purposes of focalization the most relevant perceivers are narrators and reflectors, nevertheless
other characters (non-reflectors) and readers must also be considered as possible subjects of
perception. An act of perception involves online or offline input based on th e usual perceptual modes,
offline perceptions being dreams, visions, and recalled memory scenes. Percepts may be stable or
unstable (less or more ambiguous), fine or coarse in resolution, new or familiar, plain or supported by
verbal concepts. (The ellipses marks in these phrases suggest the likely presence of intermediate
categories.) Finally, the WHICH POINT OF VIEW slot includes facets like (1) the here-and-now
situatedness of the act of perception (also known as the perceiver's origo or deictic center), (2) the
perceptual equipment available to the perceiver (including any technical and organic options as well as
their affordances and limitations), and (3) the all-important aggregate of mindset factors. All of these
elements will be examined in much more detail in the following sections.
While the general definition of focalization as given in 3.2.1 is still compatible with our revised
approach, we can now refine it as follows.
• focalization: the perspectivization of narrative information by alignment to the orientation,
perception, and thought of a focalizer. A focalizer may be a narrator (narrator-focalizer) or a
character (reflector , character-focalizer, internal focalizer). Like any perceiver, a focalizer
'sees X as Y', in effect creating a filtered and colored view of the world. Apart from a focalizer's
specific perceptional ability, restriction, or equipment (being short- or far-sighted, using a
magnifying glass etc), his/her worldview also depends on a mindset of mental dispositions
such as state of mind, attitude, interest, attention, knowledge, preferences, norms and values,
ideological orientation, interpretive strategies etc (Rimmon-Kenan's 'facets of focalization',
Nünning's 'norms and values', Fish's 'interpretive strategies', Jackendoff's 'preference rules').
At this point, think of Patrick Süskind's novel Perfume, in which the main focalizer is gifted with an
exceptional sense of smell. Or of Rose, the main character in Ursula LeGuin's "The Diary of the Rose",
who knows how to operate a 'psychoscope', a science fiction gadget that visualizes other people's
thoughts. Next, think of the proverbial optimist who sees his glass as half full, or of people who have a
'one-track mind'. Or of our friend Kermit the frog, to whom most things out there either are or aren't
flies. Think of a murder mystery in which one chapter presents the story's events as seen through the
eyes of a pathological serial killer, while another shows us one of his attacks as filtered through the
perception of a victim, and a third one lets us witness the deductive reasoning of the profiler-detective
second-guessing how the murderer's mind ticks. Note how the same narrative content could be
presented quite differently – by selecting other focalizers or no internal focalizers at all, other points of
attack, different sequential arrangements etc. Consider Mansfield's short story "Miss Brill" (1920),
where we encounter a third-person reflector with an entirely rose-tinted worldview (to be wholly
demolished in the end). Explore the hooliganized world created by and in the mind of the homodiegetic
narrator-cum first-person reflector in Burgess's A Clockwork Orange (1962). Grapple with the jaded
pedophiliac's mind coloring Nabokov's Lolita. Note how easy it is to accept characters and narrators as
focalizers and to adduce heterodiegetic and homodiegetic examples.
For ease of reference, I will generally consider a focalizer's perception and thought acts as parts of
their mental activity or mentation. Narrators, performing their job of focalizing a narrative, give the
narrative a perspectivized shape (this is the only sense of 'focalizer' that Genette accepts [1988: 73]).
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The narrative discourse itself is a product of the narrator's mentation, which usually includes reader-
oriented (pragmatic) goals such as being polite, relevant, and informative. Internal focalizers, in
contrast, entertain no pragmatic relations with the reader, nor have they any inkling of the fact that
they are used as internal focalizers. It is the narrator-focalizer who controls everything, and, strictly
speaking, all internal focalizers are only stand-ins – substitute focalizers, used by the narrator (the
'primary' focalizer), for the special purposes and effects of internal focalization. There is only one way
in which narrators and readers can interact with reflectors and that is by the unilateral process of
'transposition', to which I will come in a moment.
3.2.11. Let us be clear about the consequences of such "coming to terms" (Chatman 1990). The first
and most basic premise followed here is that any narrative text has at least one narrator-focalizer.
Second, a text may or may not have one or several internal focalizers. Third, because narrators are
accepted as focalizers the term 'nonfocalization' no longer fits anything, not even a seemingly
objective utterance like "Water boils at 100°C" (cf Genette [1988: 101]). The same goes for the
examples of 'zero focalization' cited in Jahn (1999). Fourth, 'external focalization' may still
meaningfully refer to a behaviorist description, or neutral report, of events, nevertheless it is here
understood to proceed from, hence to express, a narratorial point of view. In order to avoid confusion,
I have already suggested to deprecate the term 'external focalization' in favor of 'outside view',
acknowledging that however neutral or behaviorist an outside view may be, it is based on somebody's
viewpoint and perception (the narrator's 'imaginary perception', to be precise). Fifth, while it makes
terminological sense to oppose the terms 'internal focalizer' and 'external focalizer' (the latter Bal's
variant designation for a narrator-focalizer), the plain fact is that an "external" focalizer's focalization
does not normally result in external focalization (outside view), indeed that happens only rarely. For
this reason, I will stick to the term 'narrator-focalizer', denoting an agent who is free to use inside
and/or outside views as s/he sees fit.
3.2.12. In order to get a firmer grip on further aspects of perception I would like to dig up a 'mental
model' of vision that I introduced in an earlier essay (Jahn 1996).
Fig. 8. A model of visual perception.
Figure 8 displays the basic relationships between a World, an eye, and a field of vision. More
specifically, it lists two 'foci' corresponding to two distinct meanings of the word focus, a key concept
also in Genette's exposition. Hence F1, or 'focus-1', is the burning point of the eye's lens (the point
marked "+" indicating a person's literal 'point of view'), and F2 or 'focus-2', is the area in focus
including the object focused on.
Because vision stands out as the standard prime example of perception, it lends itself to be treated as
prototypical and paradigmatic. Naturally there is no denying that there are important differences
between the various perceptual channels, but there is also a strong general family resemblance that
allows us to recognize many common features, especially things like mindset conditioning and the
'shaping-eye' effect. Therefore, by metaphoric extension, our model's eye may be taken to represent
any and all sense organs, while F1 stands for a perceiving subject, a focalizer, a text's 'central
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consciousness' etc, and F2 indicates the 'what' or 'percept' that is seen (Bal's 'focalized'). Finally, V
circumscribes the extent of a focalizer's perception, including liminal cases such as peripheral, out-of-
focus, and semiconscious percepts. Note that both F2 and V are variable in location and extent and
therefore already act as initial filters (reductions, restrictions) on the complexity of the world. Because
filtering errors are of particular interest in this context the reader is invited to take part in the striking
'selective attention test' offered at www.dansimons.com/videos.html demonstrating the so-called
'inattentional blindness' effect.
Commenting on the 'vision-centric' approach pursued here, Huck (2009) has pointed out that we do
not actually have an "aural, olfactory or even a haptic equivalent to a point of view: a point of smell,
maybe, or a point of taste" (2009: 202). Well, one can certainly speak of a 'point of audition'; it's a
well- established film-theoretical term. Nevertheless, Huck has a point. Perhaps a more suitable
common element could be found in a parameter question like "WHO perceives WHAT as happening
WHERE/WHEN" – in which WHO is the central consciousness that shapes perception and sensation,
WHAT is the X-perceived-as-Y percept, and WHERE/WHEN is the perceived spatio-temporal
situatedness of Y.
3.2.13. Al ong with Bickerton (1995) let us distinguish two kinds of perception:
• online perception / primary perception: vision, audition, touch, smell, taste, and other
sensations (pain, heat etc), based on actual sensory input. Jost's and Nelles's terms for the
textual representations of these are ocularization (vision), auricularization (audition),
gustativization (taste), olfactivization (smell), and tactivilization (touch).
• offline perception / imaginary perception: the imaginary sights, sounds, touches, smells,
tastes, and other sensations that one perceives in recollection, vision, hallucination, and dream
(without actual sensory data input). Often colloquially referred to as what one sees/hears "in
the mind's eye/ear".
As Gerald Prince (2001: 44) says, "the verb 'perceive' has to be taken in a broad rather than narrow
acceptation: to apprehend with the senses (to see, hear, touch, etc) or with the mind, or with
something like their equivalent. In other words, what is perceived may be abstract or concrete,
tangible or intangible – sights, sounds, smells, or thoughts, feelings, dreams, and so on".
In Marcel Proust's seven-volume novel In Search of Lost Time (1913-27) (one of the key texts of 20C
fiction and Genette's master test case), both online and offline perceptions show up as recurring topics
(leitmotifs ), and interestingly they are all seemingly chance and trivial – the sight of some trees from a
coach, the sound of a spoon on a plate, the feel of uneven flagstones in a courtyard, the taste of a
Madeleine cookie dunked in a cup of tea (that's the universally known one), the smell of a public toilet
on the Champs Elysées, and bending down to open one's shoelaces.
3.2.14. Further on offline perception consider this passage about a condemned man's vision of future
events:
I see the lives for which I lay down my life, peaceful, useful, prosperous and happy, in that England which I
shall see no more. I see Her with a child upon her bosom, who bears my name. I see her father, aged and bent,
but otherwise restored, and faithful to all men in his healing office, and at peace. I see the good old man, so
long their friend, in ten years' time enriching them with all he has, and passing tranquilly to his reward.
(Dickens, Tale of Two Cities, copied from 5.2.1)
In fiction, the representation of imaginary perception generally uses the same styles and techniques
that are used to represent characters' online perception. This can be employed for manipulative
purposes as in the 'verisimilar dream' case where the reader at a late point in the narrative
proceedings is told that previous happenings were "all a dream" (cp James Thurber's great short story
"The Lady on 102"). That said, imaginary perception often advertises its status by being notably less
realistic than online perception. It is, of course, not bound by real-life constraints and allows all sorts
of spatiotemporal jumps. Add to this that it can be extremely fuzzy or 'grainy' one moment and
extremely 'high density' the next, as when a significant memory detail swims into focus. The Proust
examples mentioned above – all of them loaded 'epiphanies' (3.3.10 ) – are cases in point. Perhaps the
most famous example can be found in Wordsworth's "I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud" where, in the
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final stanza, it is the poet's remembered (offline) vision of the daffodils that makes him understand the
true impact of the original experience:
I gazed – and gazed – but little thought
What wealth the show to me had brought:
For oft, when on my couch I lie
In vacant or in pensive mood,
They flash upon that inward eye
Which is the bliss of solitude;
And then my heart with pleasure fills,
And dances with the daffodils.
Consider also the finely paradoxical statement "I shut my eyes in order to see" generally attributed to
the French painter Paul Gauguin.
Regarding narrative texts, two special cases of offline perception are of particular importance. One is
that in the process of narrating the narrator imagines or recollects the incidents of the story, or, to
factor it out more succinctly, the heterodiegetic narrator imagines and the homodiegetic narrator
recollects, recollection clearly being a special type of imaginary perception. The other special case,
often noted by theorists, is that narrative "invites the reader's imaginative cooperation" (Genette
1993: 39-40), or as Ohmann (1971: 14) puts it, the text "leads the reader to imagine a speaker, a
situation, a set of ancillary events". We, too, will consider the reader a crucial player in the 'game of
focalization' (Vitoux 1982).
Another point worthy of note is that imagining sights and sounds is generally easier than imagining
smells and tastes. As Ryan (2010: 470) argues, percepts of taste and smell may well rely on being
associated with wider conceptual processes and structures. Indeed, it is sensible to assume that
perception can involve conceptualization (thought), either concurrently or as a cause and effect
process. Similarly, Herman (2009: 123) has argued that focalization needs to be correlated to general
sense-making strategies available via a 'cognitive grammar'. We will take these notions on board by
closely linking focalization and other mental activities.
3.2.15. Figure 9 lists and connects elements and processes of mentation.
Fig. 9. Processes of mentation.
The graphic shows the external World as opposed to a human Consciousness, with the vertical dotted
line separating the external and the internal or psychological space. World meets mind at the point
where our senses translate external stimuli into 'sense data'. Considering the limited sensitivity of our
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sense organs this first filtering is responsible for the relative coarseness or 'graininess' of the input
data. The 'X to Y' module then goes on to construe percept Y as the product of the data and any or all
of the mindset factors.
Fairly often, a percept will be accompanied by a concurrent stream of thought, and for this reason
percept and thought have been drawn as permeable and overlapping shapes. A percept may trigger a
thought, and a thought may shadow or supplement a percept (see the note on 'conceptualization' and
'perceptualization' in the next para). For offline sense-data input the model specifies imagination and
memory as input-generating modules. While much of the makeup of these modules resists rational and
intuition-based analysis, what we can say is that, like percepts and thoughts, imagination and memory
are best treated as linked and mutually supportive faculties. For instance, imagination can flesh out a
fleeting impression and make a fuzzy memory more distinct. This generally is a necessary and
enabling condition, but it can also be a possible cause of error (usually called the 'false memory
syndrome', see this wikipedia entry for definition and examples). The farther we go back in memory
the stronger the influence of imaginary gap-filling tends to be, up to a point where we can no longer be
certain that what we remember ever actually happened (see 3.2.29.3 for a narrator's comment on
this). Moreover, any sense data played back via the secondary route of memory needs to be
reprocessed by the "X to Y" module, possibly resulting in a Y' notably different from the original Y –
usually because one's mindset has changed in the course of time. But the converse is also true – very
few if any of the elements generated in and by the imagination are wholly "new" because many offline
percepts can be traced back to percepts already present in memory. Of course, even though not shown
in the graphic, there is also a strong linkage between memory and the various mindset components.
Note that the narrator – the agent responsible for the text's realization – is under no obligation to
present a focalizer's mentation exhaustively. Rendering all of a character's perceptions, feelings,
thoughts and emotions at any given moment just isn't a practicable option. Much of the information
would be redundant, communicative efficiency would suffer severely, narrative speed would become
unmanageable (5. 2.3). Add to this that readers are usually good at handling selective information and
filling gaps. Nevertheless, we can of course distinguish between styles of 'rich' and styles of 'sparse'
representations. In "The Killers" example, for instance (3.2.4), we encounter a markedly sparse
representation which displays the reflector's visual and auditory percepts but excludes any mention of
emotions, feelings, and thoughts. The opposite case – a rich representation covering much minute
detail of many mental activities – can be found in Péter Nádas's novel Parallel Stories (2005).
For a further distinction, consider that both imaginative perception and memory recall can happen in
'controlled' or 'spontaneous' fashion, with (obviously) various stages in between. Typically, a narrator
can exert a high degree of control over his or her imaginative visions, often aided by the process of
revision. We need to use the term 'spontaneous' with due caution, however, as there may be all sorts
of causes that we are not necessarily conscious of. Let us also note that the perceiver of imaginative
data may be aware or unaware of its offline status – which, by the way, is often used as a deceptive
narrative device). Still, as long as we are aware of the deceptive potential, the distinction generally
allows us to tag a dream as 'offline/unaware' and a day-dream as 'offline/aware'.
3.2.16. Percept and thought usually appear in correlation and interaction, and sometimes they may be
linked as cause and effect. I will use the term conceptualization to describe the fact that a percept
has triggered a thought or evoked a particular concept (for instance, I may recognize a squiggle on a
piece of paper as uncle George's signature). Conversely, I will speak of perceptualization when a
thought or concept evokes a percept ("imagine a duck"). Generally, a person who has access to
specialist knowledge is likely to have more 'articulate' perceptions than others, such as when
somebody is able not only to just see a tangle of wires but to identify a damaged electrical coil.
Narrative texts present many instructive examples. Readers generally perceptualize what the text tells
them (see 3.2.18 and 3.2.22 for examples), and narrators often take great pains to use the exactly
right words to represent a character's perceptions. Note the use of typical diction and dialect in the
following example:
Ol Abe always felt relaxed and great in his Cadillac and today he felt betteranever. Ghuddham if this wasnt a
real fine day and he looked at the back seat, at the floor (seems to be a little messy, but the boys always clean
it out after theys finished washin), rubbed his hand along the fine upholstery, patted the dashboard again
(ghuddamn if it didnt shine like a babys ass), turned up the radio and once more dug the cats washin their cars
with buckets of water, soap and sponges. (Selby, Last Exit to Brooklyn 275)
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Consider also the following passage in which the text simulates the reduced conceptual competence of
an animal, a lion, who the narrator momentarily picks as a reflector. The "object" and "thing" observed
by the lion is a safari jeep. There is quite a jarring effect when the text suddenly shifts to an entirely
different level of conceptualization.
Then watching the object, not afraid, but hesitating before going down the bank to drink with such a thing
opposite him, he saw a man figure detach itself from it and he turned his heavy head and swung away toward
the cover of the trees as he heard a cracking crash and felt the slam of a .30-06 220-grain solid bullet that bit
his flank and ripped in sudden hot scalding nausea through his stomach. (Hemingway, "The Short Happy Life
of Francis Macomber")
3.2.17. Depending on whether it is online or offline perception (3.2.13) that is taking part in an act of
mentation, let us distinguish between online mentation and offline mentation. Using these terms
we can lay out a general framework of focalization that includes levels, dependencies, and processes.
Fig. 10. The framework of focalization.
A narrator's online mentation is grounded in the point-of-view co-ordinates of his or her discourse
here-and-now (basic stance: Here I am, telling this story). Provisionally, we may take this to be the
reader's reception here-and-now as well – Here I am, reading this novel, in the presence of someone
telling a story.
A narrator's offline mentation allows him or her – and us – to relocate to the imaginary co-ordinates of
the story, as indicated by the 'transposition A' jump from discourse here-and-now to story here-and-
now. Many point-of-view options fan out at this point, for instance, Here I (the narrator) am, looking at
the scene of action from a panoramic point of view; or, Here I am, positioning myself within earshot,
so that I can overhear (and thus report) a conversation between characters; or, Here I go, executing
'transposition B' to co-experience the reflector's own online or offline mentation. Readers, for their
part, may imaginatively hear the narrator speak and, like the narrator, let themselves be transported
to various locations in the story here-and-now, or right into the mind of a reflector character. Of
course, characters, too, imaginatively transpose to other times and places, but in their case it is from a
base position of story here-and-now to offline here-and-now, and, normally, back again. As just noted,
in the mode of internal focalization any reflector's offline here-and-now becomes a target transposition
location for narrator and reader as well.
3.2.18. Unsurprisingly, authors and narrators are well aware of the fact that transposition is part and
parcel of the "imaginative co-operation" required from readers (Genette 1993). Note the following
"invitations":
It was now the middle of May, and the morning was remarkably serene, when Mr Allworthy walked forth on
the terrace where the dawn opened every minute that lovely prospect we have before described to his eye. [...]
Reader, take care. I have unadvisedly led thee to the top of as high a hill as Mr Allworthy's and how to get
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thee down without breaking thy neck, I do not well know. However, let us e'en venture to slide down together,
for Miss Bridget rings her bell, and Mr Allworthy is summoned to breakfast, where I must attend, and, if you
please, shall be glad of your company. (Fielding, Tom Jones [1749])
You shall see them, reader. Step into this neat garden-house on the skirts of Whinbury, walk forward into the
little parlour – there they are at dinner. [...] You and I will join the party, see what is to be seen, and hear what
is to be heard. (Charlotte Brontë, Shirley [1849])
As a matter of fact, we can hardly ever refuse a narrative's invitation to "step into" the story or join
the story's "party" – unless, that is, if we decide to stop reading or listening. Interestingly, the Brontë
passage was copied from 2.3.5 , where it is cited as an example of narrative 'transgression'. In the light
of our present theorizing I am tempted to say that it is nothing less than a narrative essential.
Nevertheless, we should allow for the fact that potential transposition targets may exert a variable
gravitational pull, depending on factors like the perceptual graininess of the text and the degree of
narratorial or figural prominence. As we saw in our initial discussion of the figural narrative situation
(1.17 f.), features like these are often directly correlated.
3.2.19. The concept of transposition is squarely owed to Karl Bühler, who illustrated it by referring to
the saying If the mountain won't come to Mohammed then Mohammed must go to the mountain. In
Bühler's adaptation, Mohammed is cast in the role of a perceiver, and the mountain is assumed to be a
distant object beyond his range of online perception. Yet Mohammed doesn't necessarily have to go to
the mountain. Locked in his current spatiotemporal coordinates – his 'I-here-now point of origin' or (as
Bühler called it) 'origo' – Mohammed can (i) let the mountain come to him by picturing it to be
standing right outside his window, or else (ii) he can mentally go to the mountain and see it from an
assumed point of view, or (iii) he can point in the direction of where he knows the mountain to be,
describing it from afar and relating it to his own bodily orientation. Type (ii) is what Bühler famously
calls 'transposition to the Phantasma' – the precise move readers execute when they immerse
themselves in a fairy tale, listen to a travelogue, or read a novel. For illustration Bühler presents an
eye-opening observation:
Suppose the hero is sent to Rome and the author has the choice whether he should continue his account
with there or here. "There he stamped around the forum the whole live-long day, there ..." It could just as
well be here; what is the difference? Here implies a displacement of Mohammed to the mountain, whereas
there at such a position in the context simulates the third type. (1990 [1934]: 155)
Even in everyday perception and conversation, Bühler points out, we are continually transposing to
virtual deictic positions, mentally rotating our body axes in order to assess where something is in
relation to ourselves, or how something must appear to somebody else, or to guess what it must be
like to be in a particular situation. Interestingly, the one target location Bühler does not explicitly
mention is moving into somebody's head and seeing the world from a reflector's point of view.
However, it is clear that this, too, is a variant of his transposition to the Phantasma.
While I will stick with Bühler's term many competing concepts have been suggested in the literature.
Gerrig (1993) uses 'immersion', Duchan et al. (1995) develop a 'deictic shift theory'. Ryan (1991)
describes processes of 'recentering' and 'relocation' in possible worlds; Ryan (2013) discusses
'immersion', 'telepresence', and 'interactivity' as well as degrees of readerly "absorption", including (at
the high end of the scale) stages such as "imaginative immersion", "entrancement", "addiction", and
others. Wolf (2013) and Koblizek, ed (2017) are readers on a theory of 'aesthetic illusion'. Drawing on
neuroscientific research, Wojciehowski and Gallese (2011) have proposed a widely noted theory of
'embodied simulation'.
3.2.20. Let's look at two examples of narratorial focalization, both specifically concerned with
online mentation. A narrator's online mentation is usually presented in the narrative mode of comment
(5. 3.2 ). Comment is a narrative pause which momentarily focuses not on past story events but on the
narrator's current situation, as s/he is presenting (writing or speaking) the narrative discourse. Here
are two examples, one homodiegetic and one heterodiegetic.
I read over the above lines and cannot help remarking in myself a certain discomfort, a physical oppression
only too indicative of the state of mind in which I sit down today in my little study, mine these many years, at
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Freising on the Isar, on the 27th of May 1943, three years after Leverkühn's death (three years, that is, after he
passed from deep night into the deepest night of all), to make a beginning at describing the life of my unhappy
friend now resting – oh, may it be so! – now resting in God. (Mann, Doctor Faustus 9)
The novel's homodiegetic narrator here pauses in the act of telling the story to look at "the above
lines" (this is the online perception of the manuscript that lies before him, and at the same time it is
the printed text we are just reading). Then he goes on to comment on his present environment, the
current date, his "state of mind", and his current difficult project, which is writing the biography of his
friend Leverkühn. The passage helps us build a mental image of the narrator, his discourse here-and-
now, his emotional state, and, last but not least, the particular mindset that drives his perception of
the story matter. Logically enough, we will call this type of focalization online homodiegetic and its
third-person counterpart online heterodiegetic.
For an example of the online heterodiegetic type we'll go right back to one of the earliest novels in
English, Robert Greene's Pandosto, written in 1588. It begins as follows:
Among all the passions wherewith human minds are perplexed there is none that so galleth with restless
despite as that infectious sore of jealousy, for all other griefs are either to be appeased with sensible
persuasions, to be cured with wholesome counsel, to be relieved in want, or by tract of time to be worn out –
jealousy only excepted, which is so sauced with suspicious doubts and pinching mistrust that whoso seeks by
friendly counsel to raze out this hellish passion, it forthwith suspecteth that he giveth this advice to cover his
own guiltiness.
Here the heterodiegetic narrator starts out with a general reflection. Although not explicitly mentioning
his current environment, his here-and-now is of course present in the very existence of the discourse
text itself. Detecting certain 'voice markers' (1.4 ) we can hear the narrator's voice in his emotional
diction and intricate parallelisms (euphuisms). Moreover, his sweeping statements on the subject of
jealousy seem to invite us to partake in the social game that the psychologist Eric Berne has called
Ain't it Awful. Then, by way of perceptualization, he begins to create two actor roles: one a victim of
the "hellish passion", and the other a well-intentioned but ineffectual counselor, both turning into
fleshed-out characters in what follows. (In A Winter's Tale Shakespeare used a modified version of the
plot.) Just like in the Mann passage quoted before, the narrator's mindset shapes form and structure of
the narrative he is going to tell.
Many critics have dismissed comment passages, especially when coming from a heterodiegetic
narrator, as rambling and irrelevant excursions. True enough, momentarily foregrounding the
narrator's here-and-now, they keep the reader from getting on with it – getting on with what the
characters do and what happens next at the level of story here-and-now. However, as the two
excerpts demonstrate, narrators may use such 'intrusions' (Lodge 1992: ch2) for important tasks such
as revealing their mindsets, reaching out to their readers, and creating a common focus of interest.
Now often termed 'metanarrative comment', a narrator's online mentation is well worth close analysis
(Neumann and Nünning 2014); be warned, however, that some narrators may turn out to be
unreliable or even deceptive both in presentation and in evaluation (7.6 ). If, on the other hand,
narrators do not let any online mentation enter their discourse then it is up to the reader to work out
the teller's mindset and communicational stance from other textual cues.
3.2.21. From narratorial online mentation we now turn to the more important case of narratorial
offline mentation – with the narrator "looking at the action". Using three main sets of features – (i)
presence or absence of characters in the scene, (ii) position of the narrator's scenic point of view/point
of audition, (iii) choice of outside or inside views – we can derive five main types (plus many
subtypes):
(1) Outside view I: no characters in scene
In a scene without any characters the narrator freely positions him- or herself so as to report
happenings and describe existents from a panoramic, bird's eye, close up, or detail point of view. (The
Michener passage quoted in 3.2.2 uses a panoramic view.)
(2) Outside view II : characters in scene
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Even if there are characters – potential internal focalizers – present in the scene, the narrator may still
choose to use outside views only. The point-of-view positions or camera shots are the same as listed in
(1). The 'within earshot' position perhaps deserves special mention because it identifies a point of
audition that allows the narrator to overhear and report a current conversation. (See the annotated
Hardy passage in 3.2.22 for an example.)
(3) Inside view I: hypothetical
Without actual or certain knowledge of what a character saw or thought, the narrator reports what
s/he thinks a character "must have" seen or thought – the basis of the inference being implicit self-
characterization (7.5), general and actual behavior, or even ordinary speculation (loosely called 'mind-
reading'). The device is frequent in heterodiegetic nonfiction such as historiography and biography, but
it can also appear in homodiegetic speculation on other minds (or even one's own, see 3.2.29.3).
Example: "Kafka must have been wildly resentful of his two brothers" (Cohn 1999: 27).
(4) Inside view II: psycho-narration
Looking into a character's mind, the narrator reports and comments on conscious, semi-conscious, or
unconscious processes from a distanced, "psycho-analytical" point of view. Typically, the narrator will
discuss and evaluate a character's mentation, and may incidentally note what the character is not
aware of. As Cohn (1999: 26) puts it, it is a "technique where the narrator's voice is clearly set off
from the language that runs through his subject's head". (See Cozzens example in 3.2.29.4.)
(5) Inside view III : internal focalization
The narrator positions him- or herself in the mind of a character-focalizer, thereby delegating
focalization to the reflector's mentation. This is the standard setup of reflector-mode narration in
general, and the figural narrative situation in particular, see 3.3.8 ff.
3.2.21.1. In the process of reading, attribution of focalization must be considered revisable and
dynamic. Consider the sentences "The room was dark. John opened the door and entered" (Chatman
1990: 30). One can easily read this as 'outside view I (no character in scene)' for the first sentence
and 'outside view II /character in scene' for the second, with perhaps a time lapse in between. Now
consider, in contrast, "John opened the door and entered. The room was dark". A likely reading for this
is 'outside view II (character in scene)' for the first sentence and 'inside view III (internal focalization)'
for the second. However, if we accept that cognitive 'recency' beats cognitive 'primacy' (as I think we
should, Jahn 1997) then "John opened the door" can already be read (or re-interpreted) as internal
focalization. In a similar vein, the troublesome incipit of Hemingway's "The Killers" can be seen as
either (a) involving a shift from 'outside view/characters in scene' to 'inside view/internal focalization'
or (b) as involving no shift because the whole passage can be re-interpreted as 'inside view/internal
focalization' once Nick is established as a reflector.
3.2.21.2. Further refinement to narratorial offline focalization becomes available by paying attention
to the various modes, goals, and preferences of homodiegetic vs heterodiegetic narration. As readers
of this script you know that homodiegetic and heterodiegetic content mainly varies with respect to the
accessibility, validity, and accountability of information. That is, while the heterodiegetic narrator has
conventional access to other minds and may freely and factually present third-person inside views, the
homodiegetic narrator has first-hand access to the mind of the experiencing-I/first-person reflector
only (with category (3), above, possibly serving as a substitute option). Unlike heterodiegetic
narrators, homodiegetic narrators are only witnesses to the narrated events, and the reliability of their
judgment can always be challenged by the question How do you know. The heterodiegetic narrator
imagines, and what s/he imagines is narrative fact; the homodiegetic narrator recollects, and what
s/he remembers may or may not be true. As for the fifth type, internal focalization, we can, of course,
differentiate between homodiegetic (first-person) and heterodiegetic (third-person) reflectors, but
since both types of reflectors are equally locked in the here and now of a story situation, differences
between them can only be small. The Chandler excerpt that was quoted in 1.30 and the technique of
interior monologue (8.9 ), which is used in both homodiegetic and heterodiegetic texts, can serve as
cases in point.
3.2.22. Scarry's (1995) annotated reading of the beginning of Hardy's Tess of the d'Urbervilles may
serve to illustrate the heterodiegetic case of outside view II: characters in scene. Scarry uses italics to
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spell out the "labour of imaginative construction" that the text puts on its readers. It is a great
experiment in close reading.
On an evening in the later part of May [picture this:] a middle-aged man was walking homeward from
Shaston to the village of Marlott, in the adjoining Vale of [hear the names] Blakemoor or Blackmoor. [Look
closely at the walker's legs.] The pair of legs [now picture their work of weight-bearing] that carried him
[assess how well they hold that weight] were rickety, [and how that affects his motion] and there was a bias in
his gait [watch which way the load leans] which inclined him [superimpose a geometric figure into the midst
of this representational picture] some what to the left of a straight line. . . . [Picture a second person.]
Presently he was met by an elderly parson [look closely at his legs] astride on a [look closely at the colour]
gray mare, who, as he rode, [hear the sounds coming now] hummed a wandering tune. [Hear a voice saying]
'Good night t'ee,' [and look to see who it comes from] said the man with the basket. (Scarry 1995: 21)
Actually, some commentators have begun to question whether readers always read as imaginatively
perceptive as Scarry proposes, or indeed whether it is something a good reader should do . Sanford
and Emmott's (2012) distinction between phases of 'deep' and 'shallow' text processing might be
worth exploring further. To my mind, however, realistic or not, Scarry's reading is highly enlightening,
and if there is a choice between it and one that is shallow, or cursory, or careless, there is every
reason to give it particular weight and attention. Moreover, regarding the special context of outside-
view focalization it is striking how Scarry's experiment brings out the range of possible spatial
standpoints, with the 'within earshot' option playing a prominent role. More than any other reading
mode Scarry's reading demonstrates how a passage of narrative text can be based on camera-like
'shots' and 'angles', as mind-mapped in 3.2.17. Indeed, many of the technical terms used in cinematic
practice would seem to be applicable, see paras F2 and F5.1 of PPP's film doc.
At this point we are, of course, strongly reminded of Genette's call to order that "unlike the director of
a movie, the novelist is not compelled to put his camera somewhere; he has no camera" (1988: 73).
Against this let us now posit the stark antithesis that a narrator does have a camera, albeit only a
virtual one, a recording device that selects and displays the sights and sounds that encompass a
story's scenes and events. Indeed, we can go further and say that the narrator has two virtual
cameras: one for outside views, and one for inside views – a scenic camera and a psycho-camera.
Remember, the concept of a virtual camera proved quite helpful in defining the concept of 'external'
focalization (3.2.4 ) (even if we decided not to use it). Moreover, terms like vision from behind and
vision from within – Pouillon's definitions of narratorial and reflectorial focalization (approvingly cited
by Genette 1972: 189) – are also very obvious analogies of shots taken by a film camera (in this case
the 'over-the-shoulder' and the 'point-of-view' shot, respectively, cp F4.2.4).
To labor the point just a little, consider the following impressive 'zoom-out' shot, depicting a reflector's
offline vision.
Out from Brocton. across the entire county, across county after county, across state after state, across woods
and templed hills, across waterways and railways, across beaches, bays, and capes, across the corporate limits
of towns large and small, across great cities spreading for square miles, across the enormous panoramas of the
whole eastern seaboard, the same shining morning, the same serene radiance, might confidently be figured to
lie. (Cozzens, By Love Possessed 509).
3.2.23. A focalizer, we said earlier, sees X as Y, creating a filtered and colored image of the world
depending on a range of mindset dispositions. Contrasting the offline perceptions (memories) of four
hypothetical travelers – four potential focalizers – William James offered this splendid illustration:
Let four men make a tour in Europe. One will bring home only picturesque impressions, costumes and
colors, parks and views and works of architecture, pictures and statues. To another all this will be non-
existent; and distances and prices, populations and draining arrangements, door- and window-fastenings,
and other useful statistics will take their place. A third will give a rich account of the theatres, restaurants,
and public balls, and naught beside; whilst the fourth will perhaps have been so wrapped in his subjective
broodings as to tell little more than a few names of places through which he passed. (William James,
1890: 286-7)
One can easily recognize that the four men's varying "impressions" – all clearly filtered and colored
views of the world – are the result of perceptions caused and shaped (partly also impeded) by
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individual mindsets. Interestingly, James refrains from censuring any of the views as inadequate or
false, even though it would surely be fair to say that the fourth man is less perceptive than the other
three. Henry James, recognizing the literary potential of his brother's thought experiment, added a
significant twist to it in his famous image of the "House of Fiction":
[At] each of [the windows of the House of Fiction] stands a figure with a pair of eyes, or at least with a
field-glass, which forms, again and again, for observation, a unique instrument, insuring to the person
making use of it an impression distinct from every other. He and his neighbours are watching the same
show, but one seeing more where the other sees less, one seeing black where the other sees white, one
seeing big where the other sees small, one seeing coarse where the other sees fine. . . . (Henry James,
Preface to The Portrait of A Lady)
Translated into the terms used here, this means that "watching the same show", one observer sees X
as Y while another sees X as Z – invoking the very 'seeing-as' condition of focalization that the present
account builds on. Of course, the important question – touching fiction as well as life in general – is
whether one's seeing-as interpretation of the world is correct or distorted, whether it gets us through
in life, and whether it agrees with other people's perceptions. But we need to tread carefully here:
views that may, at first glance, strike one as unusual or even pathological may turn out to be valid and
enlightening in the long run or under special circumstances. Often enough, as readers of fiction, we
encounter a strange worldview that we are happy to try on for size, on the speculative notion that it
might open our minds to something new and worthwhile. For instance, consider the new genre of
'autism fiction', of which Mark Haddon's The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time is the
perhaps best-known example.
3.2.24. While the Jamesian examples strongly suggest that perception is always and inescapably
subjective, successful social interaction normally relies on the fact that people are able to see things
identically. Hence people can usually agree on what they have seen, especially when a percept is
shaped by a common conceptualization or summarized at a certain level of abstraction. When a train is
pulling into a station, most people – very small children, train spotters, and space aliens excepted –
will see no more nor less than just that, a train pulling into the station. This is because irrespective of
individual mindsets and preferences, percepts are often compacted to fit universally familiar 'frames'.
Moreover, words like 'train', 'station' etc are so unspecific that a reader can easily accept the
associated perception as inherently identical, verifiable, and sharable.
Normally, focalizers are singular entities, but once they begin to perceive and think identically and
collectively, either as 'social minds' (Palmer) or as 'interpretive communities' (Fish), they can appear in
the plural number. We can therefore distinguish between singular focalizers and collective
focalizers, the latter including both plural narrators or a group of characters ('collective reflectors').
Stanzel (1984: 172); Banfield (1982: 96); Richardson (2009). Examples:
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", a 'we-narrative', 3.3.11).
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 [...]. (local use of collective reflectors in Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway)
Using the label 'social minds' Palmer (2010) analyzes many cases of shared perception and thought. In
scenarios like political debate, the courtroom, and war we can frequently observe groups of social
minds, each characterized by specifically colored perceptions, to meet and, often enough, fight.
3.2.25. Given that two observers may or may not see things identically we often find ourselves in the
critical position of having to compare percepts and assess degrees of difference or congruence.
Comparing the percepts of two observers watching the same scene, a judgment can range from
perfect congruence to total discrepancy or, as some critics say, consonance and dissonance (Genette
1983: 66; Caracciolo 2013):
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• congruent perception: a thing, person or event X perceived identically by two (or more)
observers, both seeing X as Y.
• discrepant perception: a thing, person or event X perceived differently by two observers, one
seeing X as Y and the other seeing X as Z.
Note that these terms identify two polar positions on what should be seen as a sliding scale.
Congruence may be partial only, percepts may count as identical or non-identical, differences may be
small or big, relevant or irrelevant to a question in hand. As in James's House of Fiction, in order for us
to judge a focalizer's perception we need to compare it to an alternative perception of, preferably, the
same thing. (And if we already have a reasonable grasp of a character's mindset we might be able to
predict how s/he would see X if the situation ever came up.) Alternative perceptions clearly become
significant when the text juxtaposes narrator vs. character (narratorial focalization challenging internal
focalization) or character vs. character (internal focalization A challenging internal focalization B). If we
add the reader to the equation, as we should, we can also set reader vs. narrator and reader vs.
character. Although Henry James envisaged a consonant relationship between narrators and readers
because "the teller of a story is primarily, none the less, the listener to it, the reader of it, too" (James
[1934: 63]; qtd Stanzel [1984: 141]), it may be more prudent to treat the reader as a free agent who
can, if necessary, deviate from the narrator's point of view up to outright challenging the narrator's
reliability (7.6).
3.2.26. The most promising if technically intricate toolset for handling discrepant perception is offered
in Gilles Fauconnier's (1994) theory of 'mental spaces'. Mental space theory focuses on the fact that
ordinary thinking often needs to use bubbles of protected semantic spaces, not only for keeping things
apart and orderly but also for thinking in terms of comparison, projection, and 'blending' (Fauconnier
and Turner 2002). Many mental spaces are construed on the spur of the moment, while others are
cordoned off more permanently as when we contrast the world of the present and the world of the
past, the world of appearances and the world of scientific fact, the world of war and the world of
peace, the world of facts and the world of imagined things. Indeed, our constructivist formula "seeing
X as Y" is a "space builder" construction, creating mental spaces X and Y (never mind that X in the
constructivist's view is not directly accessible). However, when the narrator sees X as Y, and a
character sees X as Z, and the reader sees X as W, then Y, Z, and W constitute mental spaces that
invite the dynamics of similarity, contrast, projection, and blending. The creative reasoning that is
triggered in this process may well go right to the heart of a text's meaning and purpose. See
Dancygier (2012) and Schneider and Hartner eds (2012) for sample analyses. Still to be explored is
whether Text World Theory (Gavins 2007) and Possible World Theory (Bell and Ryan 2019) could be
used to complement Fauconnier's system.
3.2.26.1. Fauconnier illustrates the basic mechanisms of mental spaces by referring to the seemingly
odd sentence "In Len's painting, the girl with blue eyes has green eyes" (1994: 12). In order to deal
with the sentence we need to construct two spaces: (i) the world of reality, where the girl has blue
eyes, and (ii) the world of Len's painting, where her eyes are green. Now, although the girl is clearly
the "same" girl, she resides in two spaces where she is assigned certain properties including the
blue/green eyes discrepancy that would be contradictory if handled within a single space. Balancing
separate spaces, essential insight may become available via comparison and projection. I don't
actually know what or if any insight accrues from Len's picture; however, here is a perfect narrative
companion piece, in which the insight arising from blending smacks the narrator in the face:
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; 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 and the ensemble like a uniform. The other evening I found a photo of myself taken shortly after I came to
Warley. My hair is plastered into a skullcap, my collar doesn't fit, and the knot of my tie, held in place by a
hideous pin shaped like a dagger, is far too small. That doesn't matter. For my face is, not innocent exactly,
but unused. I mean unused by sex, by money, by making friends and influencing people, hardly touched by
any of the muck one's forced to wade through to get what one wants. (Braine, Room at the Top 7)
The person jointly present in both current and past mental spaces is the first-person "I". Like the girl
with the blue and green eyes, this person splits into two versions: the narrating-I, situated in his
current discourse here-and-now, and the ten-years-younger experiencing-I as it appears in recollection
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and photo. Surveying the mental space of the photo the narrator notes some good and some bad
points in the outward and inward constitution of the younger self. Comparing this to what he has
become in the mental space of the present, the narrator comes to the harsh realization that while the
good points outweighed the bad ten years ago, things are just the other way round now.
3.2.26.2. Let me make an attempt to explicate the blending processes at work in the Braine passage
by drawing one of the typical diagrams and using some of the specialist terms. Because the narrator's
striking conclusion is already based on a completed blending process the first thing we must do is
"decompress" the text in order to reconstruct its "input spaces" – in this case, obviously, the ten-year
old picture of the character on the one hand, and the current feature set of the narrating-I on the
other. Actually, we know that the character's name is Joe and that at story-now he is 25 (p32), so let
us simply use "Joe-25" and "Joe-35" to designate the experiencing-I and the narrating-I, respectively.
Although the feature sets of the two Joes are not identical, there are several "co unterpart mappings"
linking similar as well as contrasting elements such as clothes and facial features. A selection of
features from the input spaces is now "projected" into the "blended space", as represented by the
straight arrow lines going towards the rounded rectangle. As a result, the blend acquires an "inner
space" compression of Joe's external change (cp Fauconnier and Turner 2002: 94). In addition, the
blend is further "elaborated" by adding the psychological and ethical dimension that eventually makes
the narrator recognize his regrettable behavioral and moral development. Moreover, this additional
insight is apparently "projected back" to the original spaces (curved arrow lines) so that the
characterization derived from the blend retroactively also colors the two original input spaces. In fact,
this is what enables the narrator to make his pointed comparison. (See also Fauconnier and Turner
2002: 46; Hartner 2012: 102.)
Fig. 11. Blending in John Braine's Room at the Top.
3.2.27. Let us briefly turn to the linguistics of point of view cues. On a textual level we may roughly
distinguish the following types. (1) Subjective expressions comprise appellations, exclamations,
emphasis, certainty qualifiers ('epistemic expressions'), idiolect, dialect, and 'mind style' (8.12 )
(Banfield 1982; Fludernik 1994: ch8). (2) Mindset cues include direct or oblique references to a
person's attitude, interest, knowledge, beliefs, value judgments, hopes, fears, etc (eg, one person's
"terrorist" may be another's "martyr") (3) Deictic expressions point to a particular speaker, thinker,
or perceiver (person deixis) and his or her here-and-now (place/time deixis). Pronouns and tenses
come under this rubric as do words like here , there , now , then , yesterday , tomorrow , come , go .
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Consider the deictics in a narrative sentence like "She felt sad now" (Galbraith 1995: 25). Relative to
the narrator's I-here-now, she has the deictic import of 'not I, the narrator, who is uttering this
sentence', and the past tense has the deictic import of 'not now as I, the narrator, am speaking'. Note,
however, that, there is a deictic now in the sentence that relates to the I-here-now point of origin of
the third-person character (an internal focalizer) and her act of perception, which is co-temporal with
story-now. Balancing these deictic pointers, we see that the narratorial deixis is largely concerned with
maintaining the past-tense/third-person framework, while the character's feelings are naturally aligned
to her I-here-now. We could say that in this case the narrator's presence is residual only, subliminal
even, as far as the reader may be concerned. Many critics (notably Hamburger and Stanzel) have
claimed that the past tense actually loses its past meaning in this context – a good idea, actually,
because it explains why now can co-occur with a past tense verb (as would here with a distant location
relative to discourse-here).
3.2.28. The juxtaposition of narratorial and internal focalization that we proposed in 3.2.17 implies a
hierarchical order in which internal focalization is subordinate to, or dominated by, a level of narratorial
focalization, even if the latter may only be implicit. Overall, it is tempting to say that internal
focalization needs to be 'embedded' in a level of narratorial focalization, just like a second-order story
can only be told from within a first-order story (see 2.4 on 'narrative levels'). Like embedded stories,
embedded focalization scenarios are often depicted in the form of 'Chinese boxes' diagrams (Nünning
2001, Dancygier 2012).
As Ryan (1991: 180-81) has argued, Chinese boxes, while instructive as final-product models, are not
very specific about the mechanics and effects of shifts that occur when moving from one level to
another. Perhaps, Ryan suggests, procedural aspects are better captured by a dynamic structure
known as a 'stack' in computer science. The concept comes with a bit of AI jargon, which is quickly
established. The particular type of stack most relevant for embedding scenarios is one called a 'LIFO'
(last-in, first-out) stack. A stack is either empty or contains any number of elements. Only one
element, the one on top of the stack, is visible at any one point, representing the current plane or level
of story or focalization, say a third-order narrative, or a reflector's dream. Shifts are triggered by
either of two operations: a new level or plane is created and becomes visible by 'pushing' it on top of
the stack, and an old (prior) plane becomes accessible by 'popping' other elements off the stack until it
becomes the topmost and current one.
Simple as the design of stacks is, its explanatory power lies in its clever combination of structure and
process. Many of the so-called 'deictic shift theorists', most notably Galbraith (1995), have suggested
that if we are dealing with the reader's task of negotiating the leveled structure of a narrative text then
we are constructing an 'ontological' LIFO stack, or as we shall take the liberty of saying here, a stack
of focalizations. Typical elements successively pushed onto a stack of focalizations include (a) a ground
level of narratorial online perception, (b) the narrator's view of the story world, (c) a character's online
perception, and (d) a character's offline perception (recollection, vision, or dream). If narrator, reader,
or character return to a prior level of the stack, a pop discards the top-level element. Once we come to
the end of the story, a final pop (or series of pops) clears away the fiction's stack. Closing the book,
the reader returns to his or her own online perception.
3.2.29. Rejecting Bal's notion of embedded focalizations, Genette drops an intriguing remark: "I do
not believe", he says, "the focus of the narrative can be at two points simultaneously" (1988: 76f, his
italics). Translated into stack terminology, Genette's statement amounts to asserting that only the
element on top of the stack is visible at any one point (which is what we also claimed above). We focus
on – we only see – what's on top of the stack. This goes some way toward explaining our readiness to
execute the Bühler transposition, to jump from discourse to story and from story into the mind of an
internal focalizer. The fact that an element can be popped off the stack so that the one underneath
becomes the current one is plainly analogous to the process of returning from an imaginary location to
an online setting.
However, as we have noted in our discussion of the sentence "She felt sad now", texts may actually
retain pointers to one or more prior orientations. Similarly, the stack of focalizations may be semi-
transparent, allowing us to be aware of more than one level and as a result permitting the reader to
choose between competing points of view without losing sight of the overall complex pattern. Let us
take a look at four sample passages to see these options in action,
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3.2.29.1. First consider the very common authorial-figural borderline case (you will meet it again as
an exercise in 3.3.12- 13).
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.
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)
The passage proceeds from telling us something about Buddhism in general to presenting a "good"
Buddhist's mind in action. It is done in such a manner that we are momentarily transported into U Po
Kyin's head in order to witness the reflector's thoughts and perceptions more or less directly. Still, the
authorial narrator plainly uses the reflector as a medium to present a world view that is largely
unfamiliar to the reader, and the brief parading of the reflector's mentation serves both
characterization and narrative exposition in so far as it introduces a new character, actually, the main
character's antagonist. The different mindsets that are at work here – the narrator's and the
character's – can be distinguished as separate but interrelated mental spaces. Above all, we can see
that "a good Buddhist" means different things to narrator and character.
3.2.29.2. Next, consider the 'dual' focalization in the following first-person childhood recollection
passage from Dickens's David Copperfield (1849-50):
And now I see the outside of our house, with the latticed bedroom-windows standing open to let in the sweet-
smelling air, and the ragged old rooks'-nests still dangling in the elm-trees at the bottom of the front garden.
Now I am in the garden at the back, beyond the yard where the empty pigeon-house and dog-kennel are – a
very preserve of butterflies, as I remember it, with a high fence, and a gate and padlock; where the fruit
clusters on the trees, riper and richer than fruit has ever been since, in any other garden, and where my mother
gathers some in a basket, while I stand by, bolting furtive gooseberries, and trying to look unmoved. A great
wind rises, and the summer is gone in a moment. We are playing in the winter twilight, dancing about the
parlour. When my mother is out of breath and rests herself in an elbow-chair, I watch her winding her bright
curls round her fingers, and straitening her waist, and nobody knows better than I do that she likes to look so
well, and is proud of being so pretty. That is among my very earliest impressions.
As is commonplace and typical, the homodiegetic narrator's recollection is selective and mobile. The
first sentence's "now" is the narrator's current discourse-now, but his imaginary vantage point already
moves to a distant point in time, also identified as "now". Only the narrator himself (the narrating-I)
can pass the judgment that the fruit his mother is gathering in the remembered scene is "riper and
richer than fruit has ever been since, in any other garden". Looking at (and into the mind of) his
younger self (experiencing-I), the narrator notices that the child is "trying to look unmoved". Then, as
only offline perception can manage it, time is made to pass in a rush, the narrator imaginatively
leaping from the garden in summer to the parlor in winter. The same two characters are present but
now his mother is in full focus, winding her "bright curls" and looking "so pretty". Watching, narrator
and character (and reader) alike are charged with emotion. However, even as the narrator adopts the
child's perception, his view is already significantly qualified (via "backward projection") by the
knowledge of a past irretrievably gone.
3.2.29.3. Here is another early childhood recollection, this time attended by explicit narratorial
comment, from Paul Auster's Report From the Interior.
In the beginning, everything was alive. The smallest objects were endowed with beating hearts, and even the
clouds had names. Scissors could walk, telephones and teapots were first cousins, eyes and eyeglasses were
brothers. The face of the clock was a human face, each pea in your bowl had a different personality, and the
grille on the front of your parents' car was a grinning mouth with many teeth. Pens were airships. Coins were
flying saucers. The branches of trees were arms. Stones could think, and God was everywhere. There was no
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problem in believing that the man in the moon was an actual man. You could see his face looking down at you
from the night sky, and without question it was the face of a man. Little matter that this man had no body – he
was still a man as far as you were concerned, and the possibility that there might be a contradiction in all this
never once entered your thoughts. At the same time, it seemed perfectly credible that a cow could jump over
the moon. And that a dish could run away with a spoon.
Your earliest thoughts, remnants of how you lived inside yourself as a small boy. You can remember only
some of it, isolated bits and pieces, brief flashes of recognition that surge up in you unexpectedly at random
moments – brought on by the smell of something, or the touch of something, or the way the light falls on
something in the here and now of adulthood. At least you think you can remember, you believe you
remember, but perhaps you are not remembering at all, or remembering only a later remembrance of what you
think you thought in that distant time which is all but lost to you now.
This passage begins by presenting a series of childish perceptions. Despite the fact that these are not
precisely oriented in time and space, the first paragraph still invites us to co-experience the child-
focalizer's "animism" (a word used later by the narrator himself). In other words, following the
Pavlovian reflex of transposition we may read the first paragraph in the mode of internal focalization.
Yet on the levels of style, conceptualization, and narrative mode – summary – we clearly remain aware
of the narrator's enveloping orientation and mindset. In fact, when the reflector layer pops off in the
second paragraph the narrator relocates to the "here and now of adulthood" and becomes free to offer
his clear-sighted comment.
3.2.29.4. Finally, let us reconsider a passage from J.G. Cozzens's Castaway, first published in 1956. I
already discussed this in an earlier essay on focalization (Jahn 1996) but in the following I have re-
edited it to cross-reference the constructivist approach pursued here. [This para replaces the
speculative 'voice tracks' model presented in v2.0]
Forced to observe the gun he held with care—indeed with dawning anxiety—he saw on the barrel where it
met the inflexible breech the engraved words "Fabrique Nationale d'Armes de Guerre Herstal Belgique,"
which was plainly no direction for opening it. To Mr Lecky these foreign words were an unpleasant discovery,
suggesting a necessarily inferior weapon, and he sat still, no longer even trying to open it. He was, in fact,
holding a Browning automatic twelve-gauge shotgun, complicated by magazine cutout and double extractors.
For this, naturally, none of the ammunition he had laid out would serve. (Cozzens, Castaway 90)
The context: the reader has so far followed Mr. Lecky, the novella's single internal focalizer, on a
Robinsonade through a deserted department store. Feeling threatened by an unknown pursuer, he has
pillaged the store's sports department in order to pick up a gun, and is looking at it now. The current
focalization scenario is as follows: narrator and reader have executed transposition B to enter the
text's mode of internal focalization and to witness Mr. Lecky's current online mentation (3.2.17).
Unusually , for a predominantly figural narrative, the heterodiegetic narrator overtly steps forward,
asserting that while Mr. Lecky sees X (the gun) as Y, he, the narrator, sees X as Z (3.2.9 on seeing
as). For Mr. Lecky the gun is nondescript; for the narrator it is a specific gun whose make and
operation he can identify. In Henry James's words, he is the one seeing more where the other sees
less (3.2.23, also 3.2.30 item 6). The narrator further tells us that Mr. Lecky does not understand the
French inscription on the gun, that he makes a false inference ("inferior weapon"), and that he is
unaware of particular consequences ("none of the ammunition . . . would serve"). Drastically exposing
the reflector's 'fallibility' (Chatman), the narrator momentarily shifts into the mode of psycho-narration
(3.2.17), as indeed he has done on previous occasions, and will again on subsequent ones. He even
slips in a "naturally", taking the reader's agreement for granted. As a matter of fact, however, even
when informed of the gun's make and operation, ordinary readers like you and me are likely to see
this particular X neither as Y nor as Z, but as W, based on our own mindset preferences (3.2.15).
Many readers may indeed make better sense of the French inscription than Mr. Lecky does, but very
few of us will have the detailed and above all relevant knowledge of guns that the narrator has.
Balancing the discrepant perceptions (3.2.25) of these three mental spaces (3.2.26) – the reflector's,
the narrator's, and our own – we can engage in the creative reasoning (3.2.26 again) that is
necessary for us to relate and evaluate the views of the two active focalizers and, not least, to assess
our own position vis-a-vis narrator and character. Complicated as the focalization setup is, we seem to
be able to handle it without much conscious effort. At the same time our constructivist approach
provides us with a good set of tools that enable us to talk about it on a fairly advanced analytical level.
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3.2.30. To round it all off, here is a checklist of research questions.
1. In what tradition of focalization techniques does the text stand? Is it contemporaneous with
the modernist styles of literary impressionism (James/Joyce/Woolf/Mansfield) (3.2.3 ) or does it
predate or postdate it? Does the presentation of inside and outside views deviate from contemporary
practice or norms? Is it innovative or retrogressive (reviving an earlier style)?
2. How does the narrator fill his/her role as primary focalizer? Are there specific locations, such
as chapter beginnings or endings privileging the narrator's point of view? Which kinds of online
perception ('metanarrative' comment passages) does the narrator engage in (3.2.20 )? Which kinds of
offline perception (imaginary perception, recollection, etc)? Does the narrator keep a low or high
profile, is s/he covert or overt (1.9 )? When, if at all, is the narrator likely to intrude into passages of
internal focalization? Does s/he prefer to use psycho-narration over interior focalization? Does s/he
make use of a psycho-camera (3.2.22) and who does s/he point it at?
3. Which characters are used as internal focalizers and which are not? Does the narrator
present groups of characters as social minds (plural/collective focalizers) (3.2.24)?
4. How transparent are the mindsets of the focalizers? Is it easy or hard for the reader to infer
or deduce them? How explicit or implicit are the pointers to mindset dispositions? What and how much
is left to the reader's gap filling or speculation? Are the mindsets static or do they develop over the
course of the story, or (for the narrator) the telling of the text?
5. Which filtering devices do we encounter? To what extent is the text concerned with 'equipment
filtering' (organic or artificial – eg sense of smell in Süskind's Perfume or the psychoscope in Le Guin's
"The Compass Rose"). To what extent is it concerned with 'mindset filtering' (usually all of the time, of
course), possibly a combination of both (3.2.9 )?
6. How coarse or how fine is the focalizers' mentation? Do they have any perceptual
weaknesses? Cognitive weaknesses? Are perceptual/cognitive achievements or failures significant
topics of story and plot? How plausible are the focalizers' thoughts, how attractive or challenging are
their imaginary perceptions? In their views of the world out there, are they 'fallible filters' (Chatman),
or are their misconceptions understandable, pardonable, defensible, 'ecologically' viable? Do any of the
focalizers have particular perceptive or cognitive strengths? Are they experts in one area but ignorant
in another? How does the text handle specialist knowledge? Does it help the reader to understand the
expert bits by offering narratorial exposition, comment, editorial footnotes or any other paratextual or
epitextual glossaries, notes, credits, hypertext links, a bibliography?
7. How rich or sparse, how detailed or superficial is the text's representation of mentation?
(3. 2.15 ) What is the proportion of online to offline perception? Does the text move towards central
moments of online focalization or offline focalization? Does the text ever obscure the status of online
vs offline perception (3.2.14 )? To what effect? Is the level of detail of the presentation constant or
variable? Is it correlated to subject matter? How much does the text expect or require the reader to
contribute? When filling the gaps, is the reader ever led astray or garden-pathed (Jahn 1999) ? If so,
then locally and revisably, or over extended periods? Is there a learning effect?
8. Which stylistic means are used to represent different types of mentation? Specifically, to what
extent does the text employ 'interior monologue,' 'free indirect discourse', and 'narrated perception' in
order to present information or achieve special effects (8.4 )? How liberally or sparingly does it use
explicit tags such as he saw, he thought etc)? Using Nelles's terms, in what proportion does the text
present and perhaps prioritize ocularization (vision), auricularization (audition), gustativization (taste),
olfactivization (smell), and tactivilization (touch) (3.2.13 )?
9. What is the role of congruent and discrepant perceptions (3.2.25)? Do they involve the level
of character vs character or narrator vs character(s)? Are they ever alluded to or even discussed
explicitly? Which topics or subjects do they concern? Are the conflicts ever resolved? Can the reader
negotiate the different perspectives by separating them as mental spaces ("A sees X as Y, whereas B
sees X as Z") (3.2.26)? Does the reader happen to see X as W (3.2.29.4)? If the narrator's and the
reflector's perceptions do not markedly differ, what are the reasons – narrator restricting him- or
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herself to what is 'public knowledge' in the storyworld? narrator remaining neutral or non-committal?
narrator allowing (intentionally/unintentionally) his or her concepts to become 'colored' by the
character's concepts (8.13 )?
10. Can one refine any of these questions by paying attention to the specific conditions of
first-person/homodiegetic and third-person/heterodiegetic narration (3. 3)? What special
characteristics can be attributed to first-person vs third-person internal focalizers or to homodiegetic
vs heterodiegetic narrator-focalizers?
3.3. Narrative situation
Both Genette (1988 [1983]: ch17) and Stanzel (1984) use the term narrative situation to refer to
more complex 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). For alternative models see
Fowler (1986), Simpson (1993), and Lintvelt (1981).
3.3.1. Stanzel's narrative situations are complex frameworks aiming at capturing typical patterns of
narrative features, including features of relationship (involvement), distance, pragmatics, knowledge,
reliability, voice, and focalization. This line of approach results in complex 'frames' of defaults and
conditions (Jahn 1997 ). The basic definitions are as follows (more detailed explications to follow
below):
• 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: 3.3.2 ).
• An authorial narrative is told by a narrator who is absent from the story, ie, 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,
including their private thoughts and even their unconscious motives (more: 3. 3.5).
• A figural narrative presents a story as if seeing it through the eyes of a character (more:
3.3.7).
3.3.2. 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 (see next para for additional first-person narrator types). 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
give witness accounts of things that happened in different locations, they don't know what will happen
in the future, they cannot (under ordinary circumstances) narrate the story of their own death (with
exceptional 'postmortal narratives' such as Faulkner's As I Lay Dying [Haller 20 19] duly noted), and
they cannot know for certain what other people think or thought (the common problem of 'other
minds').
The temporal and psychological distance between the narrating-I and the experiencing-I is called
narrative distance. Usually, the narrating-I is older and wiser than the experiencing-I, but other
configurations are thinkable (as in 'dementia narratives' such as Ishiguro's The Unconsoled, see Bitenc
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2020). Here is an example exhibiting the typical experience differential (partly already qtd in 3.2.26.1;
see 1.12 and 9.1 for further examples):
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)
3.3.3. Evidently, the first-person types I-as-protagonist and I-as-witness, originally proposed by
Friedman (1967 [1955]), can be related to the narrator's degree of involvement in the story world.
Following up on this, Susan Lanser has made an attempt to locate additional roles on a gradient that
stretches between the two poles of 'heterodiegesis' and 'autodiegesis'. Consider Lanser's instructive
graphic (1981: 160):
Fig. 12. Homodiegetic narrators (Lanser).
An I-as-co-protagonist would be Nick Carraway in F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby. Other
experiencing selves include the I-as-minor-character in Dickens's "The Signalman", the I-as-
witness-protagonist in chapter 1 of Flaubert's Madame Bovary, and the I-as-uninvolved-
eyewitness in Faulkner's "A Rose for Emily" (actually, it's a "we" in this case).
3.3.4. Typical story patterns of the first-person narrative situation. Generally, a first-person/
homodiegetic narration aims at presenting an experience that shaped and changed the narrator's life
and made her/him into what s/he is today. Sometimes, a first-person narrator is an important witness
offering an otherwise inaccessible account of historical or fictional events (including science-fiction
scenarios). Typical subgenres of first-person narration are fictional autobiographies, initiation stories,
and skaz narratives, as defined in the following.
• 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" (see 9.1 for a case study).
• 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
Note that the heterodiegetic narrator makes an appearance at the 'heterodiegesis' pole of Lanser's scale using
the definition "uninvolved narrator/no place in story world". Although it is difficult to grade uninvolvedness, it
would seem possible, in theory, to describe the involvedness status of different heterodiegetic narrators as being
more or less close to, or distant from, the world of the characters. Mansfield's "A Cup of Tea", for instance,
provides a rare example of a narrator position practically straddling the heterodiegesis-homodiegesis divide
(dotted line in Fig. 12): both the story's heterodiegetic narrator and its third-person protagonist belong to the
same upper middle-class environment and use the same sociolect (cp Murphy/Walsh 2017).
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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); Buchholz (2004) on female initiation stories.
• 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 Banfield (1982: 172, 306n 25); Fludernik (1996: 178-179, 394n1); Schmid
(2010: chIV.2). Examples: Mark Twain, Huckleberry Finn, Ring Lardner, "Haircut", Salinger,
Catcher in the Rye.
3.3.5. Authorial narration
An authorial narration tells a story from the point of view of an 'authorial narrator', ie, 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 (online
mentation 3.2.20 , pauses 5.2.3 ). As Friedman puts it, "The prevailing characteristic of omniscience
[...] is that the [authorial 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: Fielding Tom Jones.
3.3.6. Typical authorial story patterns. Usually, the authorial narrator is an omniscient and
omnipresent mediator (or 'moderator') telling an instructive story (a story containing a moral or a
lesson) set in a complex world. The authorial narrator's comprehensive ('Olympian') world-view is
particularly suited to reveal the protagonists' moral strengths and weaknesses, and to present a tightly
plotted narrative. Typical subgenres are 18C and 19C novels of social criticism. See Stanzel (1984:
141-184, 185-224); Stanzel (1964: 16, 18-25); Rimmon-Kenan (1983: 95-96); Genette (1980
[1972]: 243-245); Nünning (1989: 45-50, 84-124).
3.3.7. Figural narrration
A figural narration 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). See
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 from Martha's point of view.
Caution: never use the term 'figural narrator': the narrative agency of a figural text is a 'covert
authorial narrator', according to Stanzel (or a 'covert heterodiegetic narrator', according to Genette).
3.3.8. While figural narration is realized as a heterodiegetic (third person) text, we can also make use
of the more flexible concept of 'reflector-mode narration' 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.
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3.3.9. Typical figural story patterns. A figural narrative presents the story's action as seen through the
eyes of a reflector figure. Often, a figural text presents a distorted or restricted view of events – to
many authors, such a distorted (but 'psychologically realistic') perspective is more interesting than an
omniscient or 'objectively true' account of events. Because figural texts have a covert narrator (a
withdrawn, subdued narrator) only, figural stories typically begin 'medias in res' (in the middle of
things), have little or no exposition, and attempt to present a direct (ie, both immediate and
unmediated) view into the perceptions, thoughts, and psychology of a character's mind. Typical
subgenres are 'slice-of-life' and 'stream of consciousness' (8.8 ) stories, often associated with 20C
literary impressionism and modernism (Stevenson 1998). Indeed, many authors specifically aimed at
capturing the distortive perceptions of unusual internal focalizers – eg , a drug addict (Dickens, The
Mystery of Edwin Drood), a drinker (Lowry, Under the Volcano), a two-year old child (Dorothy
Richardson, "The Garden"), a dog (Woolf, Flush), a machine (Walter M. Miller, "I Made You"). Although
figural storytelling is usually considered a modern form, whose beginnings are located in the 19C, see
de Jong 2001 for a discussion of proto-forms of figural storytelling in Homer.
3.3.10. Four additional elements of figural narratives are worthy of closer attention: incipits using
referentless pronouns and familiarizing articles, slice-of-life format, epiphanies, and the mirror trick.
• referentless pronoun: ma ny 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. Stanzel (1984: ch6.3).
• 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 [...]". Who is "he"? Which forest? Bronzwaer (1970); Stanzel (1984:
ch6.3).
• slice of life story/novel: a short story or novel whose story time (5.2.2 ) 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 (but note, the latter text is a 600+ page novel!). See Buchholz
(2004: chV.1.2) for an analysis of five modernist short stories.
• 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:
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 ...
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)
In the practice of many authors, notably Woolf and Mansfield, epiphanies may turn out to be
deceptive, misguided, or otherwise erroneous (see Mansfield's "Bliss" for a particularly striking pseudo-
epiphany). In many modernist texts, epiphanies are made to serve as climaxes or endings ('epiphanic
endings').
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• mirror trick: a way (perhaps the only way) of conveying the physical features of a reflector
figure without using overt narratorial description. Example:
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")
3.3.11. 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: ch6.1.1); Margolin (1996;
2000).
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: ch5.1, ch7.3); Bonheim (1990: ch15); Fludernik (1993b); Style 28.3 (1994;
special issue); Fludernik (1996: ch6.1.1)
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]
• 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 sentences of narrative report 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 (8.9 ). 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", Siegfried's story in this script (9.3 ).
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")
• 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
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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: ch2) [introduction
of the concept of outside view (vision du dehors)]; Friedman (1967 [1955]: 130-31); Stanzel
(1984: ch7.3.2); Genette 1980 [1972]: ch4; Genette 1988 [1983]: ch11 [neutral narrative =
Genettean 'external' focalization]; Lintvelt (1981: ch3). Examples:
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)
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?"
"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")
The concluding sentences of the Hemingway passage make it easier to understand why Stanzel
decided to subsume neutral narration under figural narration. For narratological approaches to the
Hemingway story, see Fowler (1977: 48-55); Lanser (1981: 264-276); Rimmon-Kenan (1983);
Chatman (1990).
3.3.12. 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 from 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 knowledge basis are accompanied
by overt authorial 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.
3.3.13. As an exercise, analyze the following passages as mixed types of narration:
• 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)
• 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.
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) [already discussed in 3.2.29.1.]
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3.3.14. A decidedly rarer type of mixed-mode narration is first-person/third-person narration as
exemplified by, for instance, 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).
3.3.15. Violations of standard schemes. The narrative situations have here been described as
typicality models which capture standard narratorial characteristics (function, strategy, stance,
limitation) and the corresponding readerly expectations in culturally learned 'cognitive frames'.
Frequently, the conditions of these frames can also be made explicit by detailing the unwritten
'narrator-narratee contract'. Of course, sometimes a narrative has a surprise in store, either because
its story takes an unexpected turn or because it becomes difficult to reconcile a present mode of
presentation with the general frame or contract that we thought we could use in order to optimally
read and understand. It is this second type of narrative effect which Genette terms 'transgression' or
'alteration' or 'infraction of code'.
• 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 [1972]: 197).
Some of the problem cases mentioned above can clearly be analyzed as infractions/alterations in this
sense. Genette further differentiates between the following two main types of alterations:
• 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 [1972]: 208 example is Marcel's narration of
Bergotte's dying thoughts), or what happened when s/he was not present (illicit assumption of
authorial competence). (Note, para 3.2.21 item 3.)
• 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.)
Paralepsis and paralipsis are instances of violations of Grice's (1975) famous principle of co-operation
– the notion that speakers (narrators) are socially obliged to follow an established set of 'maxims': to
give the right amount of information, to speak the truth, to speak to a purpose (tell something worth
telling), to be relevant, etc. Cognitive strategies for handling alterations include (a) 'naturalizing' them
so that they become acceptable data consistent (after all) with one's current frame of interpretation;
(b) adapting the frame so that it allows for the alteration as an 'exception'; (c) treating it as a stylistic
'error'; (d) search for a replacement frame.
Frequently mentioned cases of alterations are Agatha Christie's Murder of Roger Ackroyd (a crime
novel narrated by a first-person narrator who turns out to be the murderer himself), Richard Hughes's
"The Ghost" (first-person narrator "lives" to tell the tale of her own death), Ambrose Bierce's "An
Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge" and Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland (containing unsignaled shifts
into a character's dream world). Fillmore, adding one word to the beginning of Joyce's "Eveline"
succeeds in spoiling everything (spot it!):
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 probably tired.
What's that – she was probably tired?? Of course, in Joyce's original, the last sentence just reads "She
was tired". Inserting the word "probably" produces "an absolutely jarring effect on the reader",
Fillmore predicts (1981: 160) – and we can see that it creates an unexpected and illogical shift away
from the story's reflector-mode that we, as readers, have already adopted. (But what about She was
probably just tired?) See Genette (1980 [1972]: 194-197); Edmiston (1991) [paralepsis/paralipsis put
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to excellent analytical use]; Jahn (1997) [narrative situations as cognitive frames; concept of
replacement frames]; Lejeune (1989), Cohn (1999: ch2) [both on narrator-narratee contracts].
4. Action, story analysis, tellability
4.1. Although 'action' is a more or less self-explanatory term, let us try to give it a more precise and
useful definition.
• 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.
Events in the 'primary story line' are often kept distinct from 'external' events that take place before
the beginning or after the end of the primary story line (constituting a 'pre-history' and an 'after-
history', respectively). According to Sternberg (1993 [1978]: 49-50), the primary story line begins
with the first scenically and singulatively presented event (5. 3.1), usually, the first dialogue. See
Rimmon-Kenan (1983: 61-63).
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)
4.2. 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 [1983]: 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)
• 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.
Prince's example lists a bare sequence of action units; Forster's example illustrates the principle of
causal connectivity between story units (see 'plot' in 4.6 ); and the third is a nursery rhyme that lends
itself to being enacted by gesture and physical contact. See also Culler (1975b [on narrative units]);
Branigan (1992: 11-12; 222n29); Chatman (1978: 30-31; 45-48); Schmid (2010: 13-15) [change of
state theory]. Propp (1969) is the first famous structuralist account of functional story units (in the
Russian folktale).
4.3. None of the foregoing examples can boast of a high degree of tellability (Labov 1972; Ryan
1991: ch8). Normally, a story is required to have a point, to teach a lesson, to present an interesting
experience (a high degree of 'experientiality', as Fludernik 1996 calls it, promoting this element to the
central feature of all narrative texts), and to arrange its episodes in an interesting progression.
Sketching his project, Branigan says:
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)
Jerome Bruner, too, considers tellability and experientiality as an essence of narrative:
[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
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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)
For an attempt to relate universal story patterns to two prototypical narrative genres – romantic tragi-
comedy and heroic tragi-comedy – see Hogan (2003).
S.I. Hayakawa relates tellability to offering the potential of identification and empathy. Hayakawa
distinguishes identification by self-recognition and identification for wish-fulfillment:
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)
For a more recent approach to empathy and identification see Keen (2007).
4.4. In the poetry script we described how elementary units often combine to form more complex
units. Just like a number of syllables may form a metrical 'foot' so action units usually group into
'episodes':
• 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.
This definition of episodes nicely dovetails with two graphic models of narrative trajectories that have
become famous: Freytag's 1863 (!) 'triangle' and Bremond's 1970 'four-phase cycle'. Freytag's triangle
originally describes the action and suspense structure of classical five-act tragedy; Bremond's model
originally aims at the system of possible state changes in French folk tales. Obviously, however, both
models have a far more general relevance.
Fig. 13. Freytag's triangle and Bremond's cycle.
Regarding his corpus of fairy tales, Bremond notes 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), ie ,
the "they lived happily ever after" pattern. 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)
4.5. Story grammars. Various attempts have been made to devise story grammars along the lines of
Chomskyan generative grammar. Some of these grammars are still used or referred to today,
especially in the context of folklore studies, empirical analysis (Stein 1982), cognitive studies and
Artificial Intelligence (Ryan 1991). See also van Dijk (1972), Prince (1973), Rumelhart (1975), Mandler
and Johnson (1977), Pavel (1985).
4.6. Exercise. Using the definition of 'episode' listed above as well as the two narrative progress
models (Bremond and Freytag), show that the following (proto-)stories are likely to have a relatively
high degree of tellability.
• Boy meets girl; boy loses girl; boy gets girl. (Benson's law of romantic comedy, cp D7.9)
• A community is threatened by a dragon. A youthful hero rides out to find it. He meets the
dragon in a forest 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".]
• 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 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.]
4.7. The terms 'story' and 'plot' were originally introduced in E.M. Forster's Aspects of the Novel (1976
[1927]). Ideally, one should distinguish three action-related aspects: (i) the sequence of events as
ordered in the discourse; (ii) the action as it happened in its actual chronological sequence (= story);
and (iii) the story's causal structure (= plot).
• 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).
• 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: ch7) 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. For a tightly-knit operatic plot see 9.3. Forster (1976 [1927]);
Bremond (1970); Rimmon-Kenan (1983: ch1); Pavel (1985a); Ryan (1991); Gutenberg (2000).
4.8. General summaries or synopses normally present a plot-oriented content paraphrase. For a
detailed story analysis, one usually works out a story's time line so that all main events can be
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situated in proper sequence and extension. Generally, a time-line model is a good point of departure
for surveying themes and action units; it also helps visualize events that are presented in scenic detail
as opposed to events that are merely reported in, eg, a narrator's exposition. A time-line model can
also show up significant discrepancies between story time and discourse time (5.2.3, below). See
Pfister (1977/1988: chs 6, 7.4.3); Genette (1980 [1972]: ch1-3).
Here is a time-line and action-unit model of Sillitoe's "The Fishing Boat Picture". For a more detailed
analysis using this model see the case study in section 9.1.
4.9. Beginnings and endings.
• incipit: the opening passage of a text. Bonheim (1982: ch6).
• 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: 160 [on Latin terms])
• 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: chs 7-8); Abbott (2002: chs 5, 12).
5. Tense, Time, and Narrative Modes
5.1. Narrative Tenses
5.1.1. 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 (5.2.2 ): the narrator's NOW.
• story-NOW: the current point in time in story time (5. 2.2); usually, a character's NOW.
various references to Harry's youth
Harry's and Kathy's walk up Snakey Wood,
Harry aged 24, Kathy 30
book-burning incident;
Kathy leaves Harry (Harry aged 30)
10 years pass; very few references to Harry's single life
Kathy comes back for occasional meetings;
picture is pawned several times
Kathy is run over by a lorry;
Kathy's funeral
life after Kathy's death (six years)
1951: "Why had I lived, I wonder."
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5.1.2. 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).
"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)
• tense switch/tense shift: a switch from the current narrative tense to the complementary
narrative tense (ie, 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.
5.1.3. The present tense in a narrative text can have a number of functions (Casparis 1975):
• 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?).
• 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 .]
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")
• synoptic present: the 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" (Dickens, The
Pickwick Papers, qtd. Stanzel 1982: 42).
5.1.4. Tense-categorized narratives. Depending on the anteriority or posteriority relationship between
discourse-NOW and story-NOW, one can distinguish three major cases:
• retrospective narration produces a past-tense narrative whose events and action units have
all happened in the past.
• 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, 3.3.11, for examples.
• prospective narration produces a future-tense narrative which recounts events that have not
yet occurred. Example: prophetic narrative.
See Margolin (1999) for a detailed comparative survey.
5.2. Time Analysis
Time analysis is concerned with three questions: When? How long? and How often? Order refers to the
handling of the chronology of the story; duration covers the proportioning of story time and discourse
time; and frequency refers to possible ways of presenting single or repetitive action units. Genette
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(1980 [1972]: 33-85, 87-112, 113-160); Toolan (1988: 48-67); Rimmon-Kenan (1983: 43-58). For a
more general account see Ricoeur (1983; 1988).
5.2.1. Order (When?). The basic question here is whether the presentation of the story follows the
natural sequence of events. If it does, we have a chronological order. If not, we are facing a form of
'anachrony':
• anachrony: a deviation from strict chronology in a story. The two main types of anachrony are
flashbacks and flashforwards. If the anachronically presented event is factual, it is an objective
anachrony; a character's visions of future or memory of past events are sub jective
anachronies. Repetitive anachronies recall already narrated events; completive
anachronies present events which are omitted in the primary story line. External
anachronies present events which take place before the beginning or after the end of the
primary story line; anachronies that fall within the range of the primary story line are internal
anachronies. See Genette (1980 [1972]: 35-85); Rimmon-Kenan (1983: 46-51); Toolan
(1988: 49-50); Ci (1988) [a critical account].
The first chapter of Lowry's Under the Volcano postdates the rest of the action by one year, making it
either a flashforward or the rest of the action a flashback. The discourse of Graham Swift's Waterland
deviates considerably from the chronology of the story. Martin Amis' Time's Arrow reverses the
chronology of the story (tells the story backwards).
• flashback/retrospection/analepsis: the presentation of events that have occurred before
the current story-NOW. An external flashback presents an event occurring before the
beginning of the primary story line (ie, in the pre-history).
• flashforward/anticipation/prolepsis: the presentation of a future event before its proper
time. An external flashforward involves an event happening after the end of the primary
story line. An objective flashforward or certain anticipation presents an event that will
actually occur; a subjective flashforward or uncertain anticipation is just a character's
vision of a likely future event. Genette (1980 [1972]: 40, 48-79); Lintvelt 1981: 53-4;
Rimmon-Kenan (1983: 46-51); Toolan (1988: 50-54); Ci (1988). Examples:
An hour later Fielding had still appeared neither at the party office nor Tetbury Hall. The faithful had been
sent away, with apologies, little knowing that in three days' time the cause of their disappointment was to be
the subject of headlines. (Fowles, "The Enigma" 190) [certain anticipation]
I see the lives for which I lay down my life, peaceful, useful, prosperous and happy, in that England which I
shall see no more. I see Her with a child upon her bosom, who bears my name. I see her father, aged and bent,
but otherwise restored, and faithful to all men in his healing office, and at peace. I see the good old man, so
long their friend, in ten years' time enriching them with all he has, and passing tranquilly to his reward.
(Dickens, Tale of Two Cities 404) [A subjective, external, and completive flashforward.]
• achrony: a sequence of temporally unordered events (Genette 1980 [1972]: 84).
5.2.2. Duration (How long?). The basic distinction that needs to be established first is that between
'story time' and 'discourse time' (see Müller 1968 [1948]).
• discourse time: the time it takes an average reader to read a passage, or, more globally, the
whole text. Discourse time can be measured in the number of words, lines, or pages of a text.
(A rule of thumb used by radio announcers is that one line of typewritten text equals 1.5
seconds.)
Typical discourse-time oriented questions are, "Can the text be read at one sitting?" (Poe's definition of
a short story); "How does discourse time relate to story time?", ie, "How long does it take to tell/read
this episode" versus "How long does its action last?". Müller (1968 [1948]); Genette (1980 [1972]: 33-
34); Rimmon-Kenan (1983: 44-45).
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• story time: the fictional time taken up by an action episode, or, more globally, by the whole
action. To determine story time, one usually relies on aspects of textual pace, intuition, and
text-internal clues. Note that story-time may have a highly subjective element to it, especially
in figural and reflector-mode narration. If necessary, 'clock-time' needs to be distinguished from
'mind-time' (durée ) (Smuda 1981, Stevenson 1998: ch3).
Some useful questions concerning story time are "What is the global time scale of the text?" (the
'amplitude' of story time) and "How does story time differ from discourse time?". For instance, while
the discourse time of Joyce's Ulysses is 650 pages of text its story time is one day (eighteen hours, to
be exact). By contrast, a single line of text such as " Ten years passed" compresses ten years of story
time to less than a second of discourse time.
Have a look at the following picture which graphically correlates discourse time and story time in
James Joyce's short story "A Painful Case":
Fig. 14. Joyce's "A Painful Case".
Discourse time of the story is 11 pages, roughly equivalent to 20 minutes reading time (page numbers
refer to the Penguin edition of Dubliners). The story is ordered chronologically but the discourse time
for the narrative units varies depending on what the narrator presents as summary or as scene ( 5.3).
The main character in the story is Mr. Duffy, a middle-aged intellectual who lives an intentionally
solitary and celibate life. One day he makes the acquaintance of Mrs. Sinico, who is also middle-aged
and imprisoned in a marriage gone stale. They become friends and spend time together, but the
relationship stays platonic until one day Mrs. Sinico commits the unprecedented act of pressing his
hand to her cheek. For Mr. Duffy this is going too far and he breaks off all further contact. After four
years, Mr. Duffy happens to come across a newspaper article reporting Mrs. Sinico's death by accident.
Included in the article is a doctor's statement alleging that she had become an alcoholic. For the
remainder of the story we follow Mr. Duffy's troubled thoughts as he visits a pub and goes home. At
first denying, then accepting his part in her fate, he finally realizes the utter emptiness of his own life.
Note that the second half of the story's discourse time representing Mr. Duffy's perceptions and
reflections, corresponds to a bare millimeter on the story time scale. (While this is a heterodiegetic
story with Mr. Duffy as an internal focalizer, there are interesting thematic parallels to the
homodiegetic "Fishing-Boat Picture" story by Alan Sillitoe, see section 9.1.)
5.2.3. In order to assess a narrative passage's speed or tempo, one compares story time and
discourse time. The following major types of relationship occur:
• In isochronous presentation ('of equal duration'; also congruent presentation,
isochrony), story time and discourse time are approximately equal or rhythmically mapped.
This is normally the case in passages containing lots of dialogue or detailed action presentation.
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Isochrony is a defining feature of the scenic narrative mode (5.3.1 .). Genette (1980 [1972]:
94-95, 109-112); Rimmon-Kenan (1983: 54-55); Toolan (1988: 57-61).
"I have your call to New York now, Mrs. Glass," the operator said.
"Thank you," said the girl, and made room on the night table for the ashtray. A woman's voice came
through. "Muriel? Is that you?" The girl turned the receiver slightly away from her ear. "Yes, Mother. How
are you?" she said. (Salinger, "A Perfect Day for Bananafish" 7-8)
• In speed-up/acceleration, an episode's discourse time is considerably shorter than its story
time. Speed-up typically characterizes a 'summary' or 'panoramic' mode of presentation.
Genette (1980 [1972]: 94-95, 95-99); Rimmon-Kenan (1983: 53-54); Toolan (1988: 57-61).
Set loose, Sybil immediately ran down to the flat part of the beach and began to walk in the direction of
Fisherman's Pavilion. Stopping only to sink a foot in a soggy collapsed castle, she was soon out of the area
reserved for guests of the hotel.
She walked for about a quarter of a mile and then suddenly broke into an oblique run up the soft part of the
beach. She stopped short when she reached the place where a young man was lying on his back. (Salinger, "A
Perfect Day for Bananafish" 14)
• In slow-down/deceleration, an episode's discourse time is considerably longer than its story
time. Slow-down is a rare phenomenon; many cases classified as slow-down are probably more
properly interpreted as congruent presentations of subjective time. Rimmon-Kenan (1983: 53);
Toolan (1988: 57).
• ellipsis/cut/omission: a stretch of story time which is not textually represented at all. "The
discourse halts, though time continues to pass in the story" (Chatman 1978: 70). Some critics
consider ellipsis a special case of speed-up. Genette (1980 [1972]: 93, 95, 106-109); Rimmon-
Kenan (1983: 53); Toolan (1988: 56).
Roses, green grass, books and peace. [Martha's last thoughts before she falls asleep.]
Martha woke up with a start when they got to the cottage, and gave a little shriek which made them all
laugh. Mummy's waking shriek, they called it. (Weldon, "Weekend" 314) [Story time has been cut during
Martha's sleep.]
• pause: during a pause, discourse time elapses on description or comment, while story time
stops and no action actually takes place. Genette (1980 [1972]: 95, 99-106); Rimmon-Kenan
(1983: 53); Toolan (1988: 56).
5.2.4. Frequency (How often?). Frequency analysis investigates a narrator's strategies of
summative or repetitive telling. There are three main frequential modes:
• singulative telling: recounting once what happened once.
• repetitive telling: recounting several times what happened once.
• iterative telling: recounting once what happened n times.
Genette (1980 [1972]: 113-160); Rimmon-Kenan (1983: 46, 56-58); Toolan (1988: 61-62). Consider
also the humorous metanarrative comment given by the self-conscious authorial narrator of Lodge's
How Far Can You Go?:
As a contemporary French critic has pointed out in a treatise on narrative [an allusion to Genette 1980
[1972]], a novelist can (a) narrate once what happened once or (b) narrate n times what happened once
or (c) narrate n times what happened n times or (d) narrate once what happened n times. [The occasion
for this comment is the narrator's problem of how to recount the sexual experiences of his characters.]
5.3. Narrative Modes
5.3.1. The main narrative modes (or ways in which an episode can be presented) basically follow
from the frequential and durational relationships identified above. First, however, let us make the
traditional distinction between 'showing' and 'telling':
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• showing: in a showing mode of presentation, there is little or no narratorial mediation,
overtness, or presence. The reader is basically cast in the role of a witness to the events.
• telling: in a telling mode of presentation, the narrator is in overt control (especially, durational
control) of action presentation, description, characterization and point-of-view arrangement.
Only two major narrative modes are commonly distinguished – scene and summary:
• scene/scenic presentation: a 'showing' mode which presents a continuous stream of detailed
action events. (Durational aspect: isochrony.) Bonheim (1982: 20-24); Genette (1980 [1972]:
94-95, 109-112); Rimmon-Kenan (1983: 54-55).
He glanced at the girl lying asleep on one of the twin beds. Then he went over to one of the pieces of
luggage, opened it, and from under a pile of shorts and undershirts he took out an Ortgies caliber 7.65
automatic. He released the magazine, looked at it, then reinserted it. He cocked the piece. Then he
went over and sat down on the unoccupied twin bed, looked at the girl, aimed the pistol, and fired a
bullet through his right temple. (Salinger, "A Perfect Day for Bananafish" 21)
• summary: a 'telling' mode in which the narrator condenses a relatively long stretch of story
time into a brief, summary report. (Durational aspect: speed-up.) Bonheim (1982: 22-24).
The years passed. The sun swept through its majestic cycles. The moon waxed and waned, and tides
rushed back and forth across the surface of the world. Ice crept down from the north, and for ten
thousand years covered the islands, its weight and power breaking down rocks and forming earth.
(Michener, Hawaii 7)
5.3.2. Analyse speed, frequency, and narrative mode in the following excerpts:
• He goes to the McDonald Hamburger stand, and to graduate student parties to smoke pot, and to political
meetings. He writes letters home to the girl with the abortion, and washes his clothes in the laundry down in
the basement of the graduate dormitory, shown the way by Ting. He eats Fardiman's apple cake and grades
many themes. He stands behind his desk in the Chemistry Building, three days a week, and tells his students
about Carnaby Street and Portobello Road. He goes to the Teaching Round Table, where all the graduate
assistants sit around a square table and discuss their problems. (Bradbury, "Composition" 293-294) [sped-up
iterative summary]
• I gave my attention back to Dr Almore. He was on the telephone now, not talking, holding it to his ear,
smoking and waiting. Then he leaned forward as you do when the voice comes back, listened, hung up and
wrote something on a pad in front of him. Then a heavy book with yellow sides appeared on his desk and he
opened it just about in the middle. While he was doing this he gave one quick look out of the window, straight
at the Chrysler. (Chandler, The Lady in the Lake ) [isochronous singulative scene]
5.3.3. In addition to the two major modes, there are two minor or supportive modes: description and
comment. These modes are supportive rather than constitutive because no-one can tell a story using
description and comment alone.
• description: a 'telling' mode in which the narrator introduces a character or describes the
setting. Durational aspect: pause. As Chatman (1978: 43-44) points out, descriptive sentences
are typically predicated on 'stative verbs' like be and have ("His hair was white. He had no
friends or relatives"). See also block characterization (7.4 ). Examples:
He had numbered ninety years. His head was completely bald – his mouth was toothless – his long beard was
white as snow – and his limbs were feeble and trembling. (G.W.M. Reynolds, Wagner the Were-Wolf)
In the centre of the square stands the courthouse itself, a Victorian building of no distinction, with defensive
cannon at every corner. In front of the courthouse stands a statue, of a soldier, his rifle in a negative
position, a Henry Fleming who has been perpetuated as he ducks out of the Civil War. (Bradbury,
"Composition" 286)
• comment/commentary: a 'telling' mode in which the narrator comments on characters, the
development of the action, the circumstances of the act of narrating, etc. Durational aspect:
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pause. Comments are typical narratorial intrusions and often indicative of 'self-conscious
narration'. See 3.2.20 and Bonheim (1982: 30-32). Example:
I've been a postman for twenty-eight years. Take that first sentence: because it's written in a simple way may
make the fact of my having been a postman for so long seem important, but I realize that such a fact has no
significance whatever. After all, it's my fault that it may seem as if it has to some people just because I wrote
it down plain; I wouldn't know how to do it any other way. (Sillitoe, "The Fishing-Boat Picture" 135)
6. Setting and fictional space
6.1. Theoretical accounts of literary representations of space have been slow in coming, especially
when compared to studies on time, tense, and chronology. For a long time, scholars simply followed
Lessing's dictum that literature is a 'temporal art' as opposed to 'spatial' arts like painting and
sculpture. Thus, for a long time, the general assumption was that a verbal narrative's setting simply is
not as important as its temporal framework and chronology. In recent years, however, the balance
seems to have been redressed, see Dennerlein (2009), Ryan (2014), Fludernik and Keen (2014), Weik
von Mossner (2017).
Let us quickly browse through some earlier accounts. Josef Frank (1963 [1948]) isolates a number of
stylistic techniques that create an effect of what he terms 'spatial form'. Using the term 'chronotopes'
(literally, 'time spaces'), Bakhtin (1981b [1973]) notes the fact that time and space in narrative texts
can be closely correlated, and this is investigated in detail by Riffaterre (1996). Stanzel (1984: ch5.2)
finds that space in fiction is distinct from space in the visual arts because space in fiction can never be
presented completely. Describing the entire interior of a room, to the smallest visible detail, is an
impossible (and probably boring) task, while the full depiction of a room in the medium of film poses
no problem at all. In verbal narrative, a room can only be described by referring to a small selection of
more or less 'graphic' detail – luckily, in the process of reading, readers will 'connect the dots' and
complete the verbal picture by imagining the rest.
6.2. For a different general point of departure, let us remind ourselves that there is a close relationship
between objects and spaces. A fishbowl is an object from our human point of view, but to the goldfish
it is a space; similarly, a house is an object in a larger environment (a district, a city), but to its
inhabitants it is a space to move or exist in. In other words, what's space and what's an object in
space is a matter of adopted perspective and environmental embeddedness. Hence our definition of
literary space:
• literary space: the environment which situates objects and characters; more specifically, the
environment in which characters move or live in.
Literary space in this sense is more than a stable 'place' or 'setting' – it includes landscapes as well as
climatic conditions, cities as well as gardens and rooms, indeed, it includes everything that can be
conceived of as spatially located objects and persons. Along with characters, space belongs to the
'existents' of a narrative (Chatman 1978). [Bakhtin (1981b [1973]); Kahrmann et al. (1977: ch4);
Chatman (1978: 96-106, 138-145); Hoffmann (1978); Bronfen (1986); Ronen (1994: ch6); Würzbach
(2001).]
6.3. Story space and discourse space
Paralleling the concepts 'story time' and 'discourse time' (5.2.2 ), Chatman proposes the pair 'story
space' and 'discourse space':
• story space: the spatial environment or setting of any of the story's action episodes; or more
globally, the ensemble or range of these environments.
• discourse space: the narrator's current spatial environment; more globally, the whole range of
environments in which the narrative situation is located. For instance, hospitals and psychiatric
wards are popular modern discourse spaces (J.D. Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye, Günter
Grass's The Tin Drum).
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More specifically still, the terms 'story-HERE' and 'discourse-HERE' can be used to identify the current
deictic 'point of origin' in story space and discourse space, respectively.
• story-HERE: the current point in space in story space; functionally, the deictic point of origin
for deictic expressions such as here , there , left, right, etc, often used in register with the
physical position of an internal focalizer (3.2.10 ).
• discourse-HERE: the current point in space in discourse space, equivalent to the physical
position of the narrator. Example:
The solid wood desk, on which I am writing, formerly a jeweler's workbench, is equipped with four large
drawers and a top whose surface, slightly sloping inwards from the edges (no doubt so that the pearls that
were once sifted on it would run no risk of falling to the floor) is covered with black fabric of very tightly
woven mesh. (Georges Perec, "Still Life/Style Leaf")
Story-HERE and discourse-HERE, in conjunction with story-NOW and discourse-NOW, identify the
story's current deictic center, ie the origin or zero point of the text's spatio-temporal co-ordinate
system. (Compare the general framework of focalizations sketched in 3.2.17.)
6.4. As Ronen (1986; 1994) has pointed out, any description of space invokes a perception of space:
apart from the reader's imaginative perception, this is either a narrator's perception, or a character's
perception; both can be either actual (online) perception or imaginary (offline) perception. For this
reason, fictional space is evidently strongly correlated to focalization (3.2 ).
Most important among the linguistic clues to spatial perception are expressions that signal the 'deictic
orientation' of a speaking or perceiving subject, representing the current deictic center. On the most
basic level this concerns expressions like near and far, here and there, left and right, up and down ,
come and go , etc. Significant oppositional spaces are city vs. country, civilization vs. nature, house vs.
garden, transitional space vs. permanent space, and public space vs. private space. All these spaces
are culturally defined (Baak 1983: 37) and therefore variable; often, they are also very clearly
associated with attitudinal stances and value judgments.
Methodologically, the most natural approach towards the semantics of fictional space is to gather the
isotopies (P3.6) correlating deictic expressions, spatial opposites, and value judgments, and to identify
the propositions that link the common semantic denominators involved. To practice this type of
analysis, try your hand on some of the examples quoted below.
6.5. Semantically charged space
What makes an inquiry into the semantics of literary space so promising is the fact that spatial
features can significantly influence characters and events. This is often referred to as the
'semanticization' or semantic charging of space. For instance, in Katherine Mansfield's "Miss Brill", Miss
Brill's room is likened to a "cupboard", a simile that not only captures the dimensions of the room but
also expresses its cramped atmosphere and the protagonist's isolation. Other examples:
I held a florin tightly in my hand as I strode down Buckingham Street towards the station. The sight of the streets
thronged with buyers and glaring with gas recalled to me the purpose of my journey. I took my seat in the third-
class carriage of a deserted train. After an intolerable delay the train moved out of the station slowly, crept onward
among ruinous houses and over the twinkling river. At Westland Row Station a crowd of people pressed to the
carriage doors; but the porters moved them back, saying that it was a special train for the bazaar. I remained alone
in the bare carriage. In a few minutes the train drew up beside an improvised wooden platform. I passed out on to
the road and saw by the lighted dial of a clock that it was ten minutes to ten. In front of me was a large building
which displayed the magical name. (Joyce, "Araby")
Here the spatial details of the boy's journey to the bazaar named "Araby" (a name suggesting an
exotic foreign space) foreshadow his frustrating experience there. The emotive connotations of the "
magical name" are partly mirrored, and partly contrasted in the drab Dublin environment through
which he passes. (Hint: consider also the initiation aspects of this story – 3. 3.4).
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Finally, consider the famous introductory description of the "valley of ashes" in Fitzgerald's The Great
Gatsby (ch2), later the scene of a tragic car accident.
About half-way between West Egg and New York the motor road hastily joins the railroad and runs beside it
for a quarter of a mile, so as to shrink away from a certain desolate area of land. This is a valley of ashes – a
fantastic farm where ashes grow like wheat into ridges and hills and grotesque gardens; where ashes take the
forms of houses and chimneys and rising smoke and, finally, with a transcendent effort, of ash-grey men, who
move dimly and already crumbling through the powdery air. Occasionally a line of grey cars crawls along an
invisible track, gives out a ghastly creak, and comes to rest, and immediately the ash-grey men swarm up with
leaden spades and stir up an impenetrable cloud, which screens their obscure operations from your sight.
6.6. Exercise: relate the following representations of space to the underlying narrative situations.
(1) [Coketown] was a town of red brick, or of brick that would have been red if the smoke and ashes would have
allowed it; but as matters stood it was a town of unnatural red and black like the painted face of a savage. It was a
town of machinery and tall chimneys, out of which interminable serpents of smoke trailed themselves for ever and
ever, and never got uncoiled. It had a black canal in it, and a river that ran purple with ill-smelling dye, and vast
piles of building full of windows where there was a rattling and a trembling all day long, and where the piston of
the steam-engine worked monotonously up and down like the head of an elephant in a state of melancholy
madness. (Dickens, Hard Times chV)
(2) [T]hey were clanking through a drive that cut through the garden like a whip-lash, looping suddenly an island of
green, and behind the island, but out of sight until you came upon it, was the house. It was long and low built,
with a pillared veranda and balcony all the way round. The soft white bulk of it lay stretched upon the green
garden like a sleeping beast. And now one and now another window leaped into light. Someone was walking
through the empty rooms carrying a lamp. (Mansfield, "Prelude" 17)
Answers. (1) is an authorial narrator's panoramic view – a highly critical one – of the novel's main setting. (2) is a
figural narration presenting elements of space as seen from the moving point of view of an internal focalizer –
significantly, some of the object only become visible as the cart gets closer to the house.
7. Characters and Characterization
Characterization analysis investigates the ways and means of creating the personality traits of fictional
characters. The general template question is, Who (subject) characterizes whom (object), in which
manner and in what social context, as having which properties. For a general introduction, see
Chatman (1978: 107-133); Rimmon-Kenan (1983: 59-70); Pfister (1988: ch5); Margolin (1989);
Bonheim (1990: ch17); Fokkema (1991); Nieragden (1995); Schneider (2000); Culpeper (2001) [the
latter two are cognitive approaches]; Eder (2008).
7.1. For a survey of characterization techniques, we will add suitable options to the general template
question. The result is the multi-part mind map shown in Figure 15, which is a much-simplified version
of Pfister's dichotomy of characterization in drama (1988: 184).
Fig. 15. WHO characterizes WHOM.
7.2. Characterization analysis relies on four basic questions. First we can ask whether the
characterizing subject is the narrator or a character, so that we can set narratorial against figural
characterization; second, we can ask whether the characterizing subject characterize himself/herself
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or somebody else, which lets us distinguish between self-characterization and other-
characterization;
third, we can ask whether personality traits are attributed by a verbal statement
or implied in somebody's behavior, which allows us to juxtapose explicit and implicit
characterization; and fourth, we can check how a characterization may be conditioned by contextual
factors such as a private or a public setting and the presence or absence of the characterized object.
7.3. Specifically, an explicit characterization is a verbal statement that attributes a trait or property to
somebody, either oneself or somebody else. Usually, an explicit characterization is a descriptive
statement which identifies, categorizes, individualizes, and evaluates a person. Characterizing
judgments can refer to external, internal, or habitual traits as in "John has blue eyes, is a good-
hearted fellow, and smokes a pipe".
The traits attributed may only be vague, allusive, or even
elliptical, as in A.E. Housman's famous "I was one-and-twenty,/No use to talk to me". See Srull and
Wyer (1988) for a theory of character attribution in social cognition, especially their use of the
concepts 'identification', 'categorization', and 'individualization'.
A narrator's explicit self- or other-characterization marks a narrative pause (5.2.3 , also 5.3.3), where
nothing happens on the level of action. A typical example is the so-called block characterization , ie
the introductory description of a character, usually offered on the character's first appearance in the
text (Souvage 1965: 34-36). Example:
He was personable and quick-minded, which might, with his middle-class manner and accent, have done him
harm; but he was also a diplomat. [. . .] His name was Michael Jennings. (Fowles, "The Enigma")
In contrast, a character's explicit self- or other-characterization is a speech act that is part of the
story's narrative action:
She [Katie] pecked Martha on the forehead. "Funny little Martha," she said. "She reminds me of Janet. I really
do like Janet." (Weldon, "Weekend" 320)
In both cases, explicit characterization may be marked by face- or image-saving strategies, wishful
thinking, or other "subjective distortions" (Pfister 1988: 184) – similar to what one finds in lonely
hearts ads, letters of applications etc. Characterization statements usually also depend on contextual
circumstances such as social setting, addressee-oriented pragmatics, and general "strategic aims and
tactical considerations" (again Pfister 184). Moreover, explicit judgments can be uttered publicly or
privately (in a dialogue or in an interior monologue [8.9 ]), and the target of an other-characterization
may happen to be present or absent in the current scene. One can see the problem of truthfully
characterizing a dictator to his face.
7.4. An implicit characterization is a self-characterization in which somebody's physical appearance or
behavior is indicative of some characteristic trait. For instance, characters and narrators can
characterize themselves by behaving or speaking in a certain manner. Nonverbal behavior may self-
characterize somebody as, for instance, a skillful chess player, an alcoholic, a coward. Verbal behavior
(eg use of jargon, slang, dialect, or sociolect), may self-characterize the speaker as having or lacking
a certain educational background, belonging to a specific social class, and more generally as being
truthful, evasive, or ill-mannered. Narrators, in particular, often characterize themselves by their
verbal behavior.
Like explicit characterization, implicit characterization is usually affected by contextual circumstances
such as a public or a private setting. Specifically, one should call to mind that the narrative act itself
takes place in a public space involving the narrator and his/her audience.
'Self-characterization' and 'other-characterization' here replace the terms 'auto-characterization' and 'altero-
characterization' that were used in previous versions of this document.
There may be some confusion potential here. "John is a smoker" alludes to a behavioral feature, but it remains
an explicit characterization because it is made in a verbal statement. In contrast, when John is presented as
smoking in the story's narrative action he is characterizing himself implicitly.
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7.5. Here are some questions testing our understanding of Pfister's model. Read carefully; the
questions may look simple, but they are really loaded and require circumspect answers.
1. Can a character characterize the narrator?
2. Suppose a narrating-I explicitly characterizes an experiencing-I – would this be self-
characterization or other-characterization?
3. Can a narrator implicitly characterize a character?
4. Can a narrator explicitly characterize a member of the narrative audience?
5. Can a character insult a dictator to his face?
1. No. Characters are not aware of narrators, at least in principle. However, should the narrator allow 'metalepses'
then the answer would be Yes. See 2.3.5 for the logic of this (or lack of it).
2. This really needs to be decided on a case-by-case basis. If the experiencing-I is distanced in time and mindset
s/he is probably best understood to be 'an other' (3.3.2). On the other hand, if the narrative distance happens to
be small, and the difference between narrating and experiencing-I negligible (as in simultaneous narration, for
instance, 3.3.11 ) then self-characterization would be plausible. Obviously, the narrator's own view and handling of
the matter should be considered as well.
3. No: th ere is no such thing as an implicit other-characterization in Pfister's system (see 7.4). All implicit
characterizations are self-characterizations. What a narrator can and does do is select and arrange situations in
which characters implicitly characterize themselves.
4. Yes; indeed, the narrator of Tristram Shandy is famous for doing so.
5. That is possible, of course, and it would at the same time amount to a powerful implicit self-characterization
indicating the character's courage, desperation, or foolhardiness. (The scenario does occur in Nabokov's Bend
Sinister.)
7.6. The implicit self-characterization of a narrator is always of major importance: is the narrator
overt? covert? omniscient? competent? opinionated? self-conscious? well-read? ironic? reliable? Ever
since Booth (1961: chs 8, 10, 12) offered his account of narratorial reliability and trustworthiness, the
topic has been discussed extensively – see Genette (1980: 182-185); Lanser (1981); Rimmon-Kenan
(1983: 59-67, 100-103); Stanzel (1984: 150-52) ; Wall (1994); Nünning (1997; 1998; 1999); Yacobi
(2000), D'hoker and Martens (2008), V. Nünning, ed (2015); Vogt (2018); Jacke (2020) [the latter
two are German language doctoral theses].
• reliable narrator: a narrator "whose rendering of the story and commentary on it the reader is
supposed to take as an authoritative account of the fictional truth" (Rimmon-Kenan 1983: 100).
• unreliable narrator: a narrator "whose rendering of the story and/or commentary on it the
reader has reasons to suspect. [...] The main sources of unreliability are the narrator's limited
knowledge, his personal involvement, and his problematic value-scheme" (Rimmon-Kenan
1983: 100). Many first-person narrators are unreliable.
True! – nervous – very, very dreadfully nervous I had been and am! but why will you say that I am mad? The
disease had sharpened my senses – not destroyed – not dulled them. Above all was the sense of hearing acute.
I heard all things in the heaven and in the earth. I heard many things in hell. How, then, am I mad? Hearken!
and observe how healthily – how calmly I can tell you the whole story. (Poe, beginning of "The Tell-Tale
Heart") [Not at all a "healthy and calm" way of beginning a story!]
Some theorists make a distinction between 'factual' or 'mimetic' (un)reliability and 'evaluative' or
'normative' (un)reliability: "a narrator may be quite trustworthy in reporting events but not competent
in interpreting them, or may confuse certain facts but have a good understanding of their implications"
(Lanser 1981: 171). According to Cohn (1999: ch8), Thomas Mann's Tod in Venedig is told by a
mimetically reliable but normatively unreliable narrator.
7.7. E.M. Forster's distinction between flat characters and round characters concerns the psychological
depth or sophistication of a person's perceived character traits:
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• flat character/static character: a one-dimensional figure characterized by a very restricted
range of speech and action patterns. A flat character does not develop in the course of the
action and can often be reduced to a type or even a caricature (eg, "a typical Cockney
housewife", "a bureaucrat" etc). Flat characters are often used for comic effect – Mrs. Micawber
in Dickens's David Copperfield is characterized by keeping on saying "I never will desert Mr.
Micawber".
• round character/dynamic character: a three-dimensional figure characterized by many,
often conflicting, properties. A round character tends to develop in the course of the action and
is not reducible to a type. Forster (1976 [1927]); Rimmon-Kenan (1983: 40-42); Pfister (1988:
177-179). Rimmon-Kenan (1983: 41) identifies Stephen in Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a
Young Man and Strether in James's The Ambassadors as round characters.
7.8. Here is a selective list of functionally determined character types (to be expanded):
• confidant (fem., confidante): somebody the protagonist can speak to, exchange views with,
confide in – usually a close friend. – Dr. Watson is Sherlock Holmes' confidant (and also his
'foil', see below). Sam is Frodo's confidant in Tolkien's Lord of the Rings.
• foil character: a foil is, literally, "a sheet of bright metal that is placed under a piece of jewelry
to increase its brilliancy" (Holman 1972); one meaning of to foil is 'to enhance by contrast'. In
literature, a minor character highlighting certain features of a major character, usually through
contrast. – In Weldon's "Weekend", Janet is a foil for Katie and Katie is a foil for Martha.
Sherlock Holmes's cleverness is highlighted by Dr. Watson's dullness.
• chorus character: originally a convention in drama, an uninvolved character ("man in the
street") commenting on characters or events, typically speaking philosophically, sententiously,
or in clichés.
"One time we had a mayor of Chicago punched your King George right in the snoot [...]. Don't forget now,"
says the cabbie, "It's better here, so if you don't like it go back where you came from." (Bradbury,
"Composition" 289) [The American taxi driver who takes William, a British student, to the campus.]
7.9. A text's system of denomination/appellations/naming conventions is the specific set of
naming strategies used to identify and subsequently to refer to its characters. Since naming patterns
often dovetail with characterization, point of view or focalization, they merit close stylistic analysis. Key
questions are:
• How (with what sequence of expressions) does a text establish a character's identity? (Cf. block
characterization, 7. 4, above.)
• Are the characters mainly referred to by first name, nickname, last name, with or without a
(honorific) form of address (Mr, Mrs, Dr, Father, Senator, Colonel, ...), or by a descriptive
referring expression? (For instance, in Joyce's Ulysses, the younger protagonist is "Stephen",
while the older protagonist is "Mr Bloom"; Dickens often uses descriptive expressions such as
"his eminently practical friend" etc)
• When and with what implications or presuppositions does the text use personal pronouns? (Cf.
use of referentless pronoun', 3.3.10 ).
See Uspensky (1973) [first close analysis of point-of-view aspects of naming]; Genette (1988 [1983])
[discussion of character identification in 19C and 20C story incipits]; Moore (1989) [naming
conventions in James's What Maisie Knew]; Fludernik (1996: 246-48); Emmott (1997) [major study
mainly focusing on pronouns]; Collier (1999) [naming conventions in Patrick White].
8. Discourses: quoting speech, thought, and writing
8.1. A verbal narrative is the oral or written text produced by a narrator through an act of narrating.
In the narrative itself we encounter passages presenting the speeches, thoughts, and writings of
characters. Very simply put, according to Genette:
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• the narrator's discourse tells the 'narrative of events'
• the characters' discourses tell the 'narrative of words'
In the following paras we will be concerned with looking at the various interactions between these two
types of discourses. Basically, narrators can quote a character directly or indirectly, or they can
summarize a character's discourse, or they can mix the character's discourse into their own. Dolezel
(1973: Introduction) describes a narrative text as a "concatenation and alternation" of the narrator's
and the characters' discourses. See also Genette (1980 [1972]: 164-169; 1988 [1983]: 18, 43, 61-63,
130); Lintvelt (1981: ch4.6.2); Schmid (2005: 4.3).
8.2. In order to get a grasp on basic concepts we will make use of quotation theory as developed by
Meir Sternberg (1982b).
• quotation theory: the theory of the narrative options of embedding a character's words. The
primary relationship is one between narratorial frame and quoted inset.
Narratorial tone can range from 'wholly consonant' (approvement) via 'neutral' to 'wholly dissonant'
(critical, ironical). The inset can represent actual words or virtual words (hypothetical utterances as
well as verbalized mental events). The inset's authenticity or accuracy can range from verbatim
reproduction to rough approximation to misquotation. See Cohn (1978); Sternberg (1982b) [frame
and inset]; Genette (1988 [1983]: ch9); Plett (1988).
• An attributive reporting clause or tag is part of a quotation's narratorial frame. It usually
consists of a phrase identifying speaker and discourse act. There are two main forms:
• an introductory tag is a discourse tag in initial position (Jane said (that) )
• a parenthetical tag is a discourse tag in medial or final position (That, she thought, was it ;
"That is it", she thought).
Usually, tags are constructions using (a) 'verba dicendi' or inquits (she said, asked, replied, muttered,
confessed, claimed, remarked, promised, announced, ...), (b) 'verba cogitandi' or cogitats (she said
to herself, thought, realized, felt, ...), and (c) 'verba scribendi' or scribits (she wrote, read, noted,
...). Naturally, attributive tags come in many forms, for instance, items like "the notion struck him
that", "he promised us to", or "According to John" etc also count as tags. Quoted discourse comes in
either free or tagged form:
• A free rendering of a character's discourse is one that is not accompanied by an attributive tag.
• A tagged rendering is one that is accompanied by an attributive tag.
See Page (1973: ch2); Prince (1978); Bonheim (1982: ch5 [historical and stylistic features of inquits];
Banfield (1982: ch1.3.1, 2.2, 2.3); Neumann (1986 [ambiguous forms in Austen]); Collier (1992b:
ch11 [comprehensive survey, but restricted to direct discourse inquits]); Fludernik (1993a: ch5.2 [tag
phrases and free indirect discourse]).
8.3. The following tree diagram lists the main forms of quoted discourse:
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Fig. 16. Quoted discourse.
1. Free direct discourse (FDD) is a direct quotation of a character's discourse without any
attributive tag phrase. Sometimes the quotation marks are replaced by other typographical markers,
and sometimes they are left off entirely.
2. Tagged direct discourse (TDD) is a stretch of direct discourse accompanied by an attributive
tag.
3. Free free [sic] indirect discourse (FFID) generally retains the quoted speaker's subjective
syntax and expressions but uses the narrator's tense and person reference. (Because there is no
reporting tag FFID may occasionally look like plain narratorial report. For instance, "She was tired"
could be a narrator's report or a character's FFID rendering of saying (to herself) "I am tired".)
4. Tagged free indirect discourse (TFID) Generally, the tag is a parenthetical tag standing in
medial or final position as in the first two items, but we are also allowing a tag in initial position as a
legitimate variant (third item). I am graying th is third item because its status is controversial in the
literature: Banfield (1982) condemns it as "ungrammatical", while McHale (1983) and Leech and Short
(2007) stress its acceptability and wide use in natural and literary texts. I side with these latter
commentators but have nudged the item's branch towards the TID node to highlight the fact that the
two styles can, on occasion, result in very similar or even identical sentences, especially when the
original utterance does not contain any character-specific speech elements such as deictic pronouns or
subjective expressions. Other than that, a TFID inset exhibits the same characteristics as a FFID inset.
For a selection of the massive literature on FID see: Pascal (1977 ['dual voice' theory]); McHale (1978
[succinct overview]); Banfield (1982 [generative-grammar account]); Rimmon-Kenan (1983: 110-16);
Cohn (1978: 99-140 [consonant and dissonant tones]); Toolan (2001) [FID test]; Fludernik (1993a)
[comprehensive account]; Schmid (2010: ch4.3) [cultural and historical variants of FID].
5. Tagged indirect discourse (TID) is basically equivalent to the school-grammar category of
indirect speech. The tag is an introductory tag (initial position), followed by a subordinate clause of
quoted discourse. Pronouns, tenses, and referring expression are adjusted to the point of view of the
narrator, and expressive elements are usually mentioned in the tag – as in she cried out loudly. Often
the narrator also summarizes and grammatically straightens the character's discourse. For this reason,
TID can markedly deviate from any presumptive original DD.
Note, on the other hand, that it is sometimes difficult or even impossible to decide whether a sentence
belongs to one category of rendered discourse or another, or indeed neither. We have already
mentioned possible identical renderings in the case of TID and TFID (see comment on TID above). For
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another example, take Chatman's tag-less sentence "The room was dark". If the character actually
thinks "The room was dark" it is a case of DT; if s/he thinks "The room is dark" it is a case of FFIT; if
s/he doesn't think or say anything at all it could be a matter-of-fact narratorial description; if it is a
nonverbal perception it is also not a case of quoted discourse but of 'narrated non-reflective
perception' (see 8. 11 below). Usually, consideration of context disambiguates such cases pretty
quickly, see the discussion of this case in 3.2.21.1 . However, the ambiguity may also be intentional
and unresolvable. Simple and clear-cut as these techniques may appear at first glance, narrators often
use them to create very subtle effects.
8.4. Let us quickly refine the foregoing general categories by associating them with specific acts of
speech, thought, and writing. All we have to do is to replace 'D' for discourse by 'S' for speech, 'T' for
thought, and 'W' for writing, respectively. As a result, we get 3 times 8 = 24 specific terms, including
DS (direct speech), IS (indirect speech), TDS (tagged direct speech), FFIS (free free indirect
speech), ..., DT (direct thought), IT (indirect thought), FDT (free direct thought), TFIT (tagged free
indirect thought), ..., DW (direct writing), IW (indirect writing), FDW (free direct writing), FFIW
(free free indirect writing), etc.
8.5. Time to check out some examples from real texts and do an exercise.
• Only I myself am novel, he thinks, the experience is not ... But what, he thinks, next?
(Bradbury, "Composition")
[tagged direct thought: TDT]
• Wonderful! The best husband in the world: look into his crinkly, merry, gentle eyes; see it
there. So the mouth slopes away into something of a pout. Never mind. Gaze into the eyes.
Love. It must be love. You married him. (Weldon, "Weekend" 313)
[FDT. As Banfield (1982) points out, it is not possible to convert an imperative construction and
forms of address into FID (feel free to try, it won't work!).]
• Mrs Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself (Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway ).
[TIS. Possible DS: I will buy the flowers myself.]
• Maisie Johnson positively felt she must cry Oh! (Mrs. Dalloway)
[TFIT (variant 3); DS: I must cry 'Oh']
• This was a lonesome post to occupy (I said) (Dickens, "The Signalman")
[TFIS (variant 1). DS: This is a lonesome post to occupy.]
• He will write to her?
He will write to her every alternate day, and tell her all his adventures. (Dickens, Edwin
Drood)
[A dialogue rendered as FFIS. DS: You will write to me? I will write to you .... tell you all my
adventures ... ]
Analyze the following passages yourself, and for any instance of ID specify a likely underlying DD.
1. Let me alone! screamed Anthony silently. Let go of me! (Metalious, The Tight White Collar)
2. Would it bore you to come with me, Mr. Tansley? (Woolf, To the Lighthouse)
3. Have I heard, she wants to know, from poor Blanche? (Delafield, Diary of a Provincial Lady )
4. The Chairman said that the Air Officer Commanding regarded the question of heating as of
utmost importance. In view of the small coal ration, was it possible or desirable to convert to oil
heating? [non-fictional example]
5. "When do you leave?" she asked.
"Tomorrow night."
She said nothing more. Strangely enough, a tinge of melancholy had settled over her spirits.
No doubt the proximity of the town was the cause of this. (Orczy, The Scarlet Pimpernel)
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Answers: 1 TDT, followed by FDT; 2 FDS (possibly FDT); 3 TFIS (DS: Have you heard from ...); 4 TIS > FFIS
(DS: He regards the question ... is it possible or desirable ...); 5 TDS > FDS > FFIT (DS: ...proximity of the town
is the cause for this; note, interpretation needed to recognize this as FFIT). [Some of these items discussed in
Jahn (1992a) .]
8.6. Our terms mainly follow Semino and Short's (2004) popular 'revised model of speech, writing and
thought presentation', a model that is frequently used in corpus analysis projects. Corpus analysis
preferably needs an exhaustive classification of text elements, so Semino and Short also define terms
like N (narrative), NI (internal narration), NRSA (narrator's report of speech act) etc. In our approach,
such elements are discussed as narrative modes (5.3). Pursuing an earlier intuition, Semino and Short
persist in arranging their categories on a scale of freedom from narratorial dominance, while here they
are left intentionally nominal. In order to address more general features, Semino and Short resort to
abbreviations like '(F)DS', '(F)DT', and '(F)DW', at the same time claiming that FDS, FDT, and FDW are
"subtypes" of DS, DT, and DW (2004: 198). In our taxonomy, by contrast, superordinate and
subordinate categories are terminologically distinct. For '(F)DS' we have just 'DS', for "(F)DS, (F)DT,
and (F)DW" collectively we have just DD, which seems quite an advantage.
Well, our model has negatives as well as positives. Terminologically, the "double free" FFID is a hard
pill to swallow and I don't expect it to become very popular in the narratological community.
Admittedly, too, a taxonomy is never fully comfortable with borderline cases and mixed types, yet
many of these – often the most intriguing ones – do occur in narrative texts, as amply documented by
Semino and Short. Schmid (2010), in particular, analyzes discourse presentations by drawing up
'stylistic profiles', based on eight features pointing to either the narrator's or the character's text ('NT'
and 'CT' in Figure 17, below). For instance, standard English and German FID in heterodiegetic past-
tense narrative is defined as follows (Schmid 2010: 147).
Fig. 17. Past-tense heterodiegetic FID (Schmid).
Note that the FID profile of, for instance, homodiegetic present-tense narrative would place the x's
differently for features Tense and Person. Exploring possible feature combinations, Schmid isolates
many interesting variants both diachronically and across languages such as German, Russian, and
English.
8.7. Let us briefly turn to some less clear-cut cases. To begin with, we may note that a dominant
narrator can easily reduce a character's discourse to almost nothing. Among such forms of narrative
report of discourse McHale (1978: 258-60) discerns three main types.
• diegetic summary: the narrator mentions a discourse event without further specification.
• summary report: the narrator names the general topic only.
• indirect content-paraphrase: the narrator summarily reports propositional content.
Discussion very active indeed [diegetic summary]. I talk to plain young man with horn-rimmed glasses,
sitting at my left hand, about Jamaica, where neither of us has ever been [summary report] [...] Go into the
drawing room, and all exclaim how nice it is to see the fire [indirect content-paraphrase]. (Delafield, Diary of
a Provincial Lady)
8.8. Presenting the mental processes of characters, their thoughts and perceptions, their memories,
dreams, and emotions became a prime point of interest as well as a challenge for late 19C and early
20C novelists such as D.H. Lawrence, Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, William Faulkner, Dorothy
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Richardson, Patrick White, and many others. Critics began to speak of 'literary impressionism', 'the
novel of consciousness', and 'stream of consciousness art'.
• stream of consciousness: originally, a term coined by the American psychologist William
James (the brother of Henry James) to denote the disjointed character of mental processes and
the layering and merging of central and peripheral levels of awareness. Appropriated into
literary criticism by May Sinclair in 1918, stream of consciousness is often used as a general
term for the textual rendering of mental processes, especially any attempt to capture the
random, irregular, disjointed, associative and incoherent character of these processes.
See Cohn (1978) for an excellent introduction, also W. James (1950 [1890]: ch9), Sinclair (1990
[1918]); Humphrey (1954); Steinberg (1973); Chatman (1978: 186-195); Smuda (1981); Toolan
(1988: 128).
8.9. The main technique of representing the rhythm and voice (?) of a character's stream of
consciousness is the interior monologue:
• interior monologue: an extended passage of FDT (free direct thought), sometimes also
considered an independent text type (autonomous monologue), eg by Cohn (1978).
Examples are chapter 18 of Ulysses (Molly's monologue), Schnitzler's stories "Leutnant Gustl"
and "Fräulein Else", Dujardin's novella The Bays Are Sere (orig. Les lauriers sont coupés
[1887]). As Edouard Dujardin, often identified as the inventor of the style, puts it, "The
essential innovation introduced by interior monologue consists in the fact that its aim is to
invoke the uninterrupted flow of thoughts going through the character's being, as they are
born, and in the order they are born, without any explanation of logical sequence and giving the
impression of 'raw' experience (Dujardin 1931: 118). Examples:
The waiter. The table. My hat on the stand. Let's take our gloves off; drop them casually on the table; these
little things show a man's style. My coat on the stand; I sit down; ouf! I was weary. I'll put my gloves in my
coat pockets. Blazing with light, golden, red, with its mirrors, this glitter, what? the restaurant; the restaurant
where I am. I was tired. (Dujardin, The Bays Are Sere) [Interior monologue representing the thoughts of a
man entering a restaurant.]
I think Ill get a bit of fish tomorrow or today is it Friday yes I will with some blancmange with black currant
jam like long ago not those 2 lb pots of mixed plum and apple from the London and Newcastle Williams and
Woods goes twice as far only for the bones . . . (Joyce, Ulysses). [Thoughts of Molly Bloom lying in bed
thinking about tomorrow's supper. The text continues in this manner, without a single full stop or comma for
over 40 pages.]
See Humphrey (1954); Steinberg (1973); Chatman (1978: 178-195); Cohn (1978: 58-98); Cohn and
Genette (1992 [1985]); Schmid (2010: ch4) locates the earliest instance of interior monologue in
Dostoevsky's The Double (1866).
8.10. Earlier forms of long passages of free direct thought are occasionally identified by the term
'soliloquy' (originally a term in drama theory, meaning a monologue uttered aloud in solitude, D3.4 ):
• soliloquy: an early style of presenting a character's thoughts. Unlike the modern stream-of-
consciousness type of interior monologue, the older soliloquy is characterized "both by a
dialogical structure and by a highly rhetorical language" (Orth 2000; cf Fludernik 1996: 147-
148). Schmid (2017) traces such rhetorically laundered FDT back to 13C epics such as Tristan
and Parzival. Here is an example quoted by Orth (2000: 441):
I had thought that women had bene as we men, that is true, faithfull, zealous, constant, but I perceiue they be
rather woe vnto men, by their falshood, gelousie, inconstancie. I was halfe perswaded that they were made of
the perfection of men, & would be comforters, but now I see thev haue tasted of the infection of the Serpent
[...]. The Phisition saythe it is daungerous to minister Phisicke vnto the patient that hath a colde stomacke and
a hotte lyuer. least in giuing warmth to the one he inflame the other, so verely it is harde to deale with a
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woman whose wordes seeme feruent, whose heart is congealed into harde yce, least trusting their outwarde
talke, he be betraied with their inwarde trechery. (Lyly, Euphues [1578])
8.11. Psychological states are usually rendered by narratorial report, especially the two forms known
as 'psycho-narration' and 'narrated perception':
• psycho-narration: the textual representation of a character's conscious or unconscious mental
states and processes, mainly by using forms of 'narrative report of discourse' or 'narrated
perception'. A special case is the report of what characters do not know, think, or say
(Chatman). See Cohn (1978: 21-57); Chatman (1978: 225-226 [report of what characters do
not think or say]); Stanzel (1984: ch7.1.8 [on "not knowing that" vs. "not knowing why"]);
Palmer 2004 [book-length study on 'fictional minds' with a special focus on psycho-narration].
Examples:
They had married in 1905, almost a quarter of a century before, and were childless because Pilgram had
always thought [iterative summary, in the following supplemented by indirect content-paraphrase] that
children would be merely a hindrance to the realization of what had been in his youth a delightfully exciting
plan but had now gradually become a dark, passionate obsession. (Nabokov, "The Aurelian")
All this Gudrun knew in her subconsciousness, not in her mind. (Lawrence, Women in Love, qtd Cohn 1978:
49).
The youth might have taken Baglioni's opinions with many grains of allowance had he known that there was a
professional warfare of long continuance between him and Dr. Rappacini (Hawthorne, "Rappacini's
Daughter", qtd Chatman 1978: 226) [report of what a character does not know].
• narrated perception: the textual representation of a character's perception, often using a
form of psycho-narration, or a rendering in indirect discourse or free indirect discourse. See
Fehr (1938); Chatman (1978: 203-205).
8.12. 'Mind style' is a general term for a character's or a narrator's typical patterns of mentation:
• mind style: the textual evocation, especially by typical diction, rhetoric, and syntax, of a
narrator's or a character's mindset and typical patterns of thinking. See Fowler (1977: 76);
Leech and Short (2007: ch6); Nischik (1991).
"Corto y derecho," he thought, furling the muleta. Short and straight. Corto y derecho. (Hemingway, "The
Undefeated" 201) [A bullfighter thinking in bullfighting terms.]
Ah, to be all things to all people: children, husband, employer, friends! It can be done: yes, it can: super
woman. (Weldon, "Weekend" 312) [The weary exclamation, the enumeration of stress factors, and the
ironical allusion are typical features of Martha's mind style.]
8.13. Following Hough (1970), the term coloring is used to refer to the local coloring (also 'tainting'
or 'contamination') of the narrator's style by a character's diction, dialect, sociolect, or idiolect, often
serving a comic or ironical purpose. Coloring is most functional when the narrator's and the character's
voices are equally distinctive (typically, in the fiction of Austen, Dickens, James, Lawrence, and
Mansfield). Hough 1970; Page 1973: ch2; Kenner (1978); McHale 1978: 260-262; Stanzel 1984: 168-
184; Fludernik 1993: 334-338; Ferriss 2008 . Three examples ('color ed' phrases underlined):
(1) Uncle Charles repaired to the outhouse. (Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist) [The original example used by Kenner
(1978: ch2) to illustrate what he termed the Uncle Charles Principle. The word "repaired" is typical of Uncle
Charles's diction.]
(2) At this foreshadowing of a desolate decease, the wicked old boy would whine and whimper, and would sit
shaking himself into the lowest of low spirits, until such time as he could shake himself out of the house and
shake another threepennyworth [of rum] into himself. (Dickens, Our Mutual Friend)
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(3) Ol Abe always felt relaxed and great in his Cadillac and today he felt betteranever (Selby, Last Exit to Brooklyn).
9. Case Studies
9.1. Homodiegetic dialogue in Alan Sillitoe's "The Fishing Boat Picture"
(In the following, all page number references are to the reprint of Sillitoe's story in The Penguin Book
of Modern British Short Stories, ed. Malcolm Bradbury, London: Penguin, 1988, 135-149. The story
was originally published in 1959.)
Like many first-person narratives, Sillitoe's "Fishing-Boat Picture" is a fictional autobiography. Harry is
a mature narrator who looks back on his past life. Although he is only fifty-two at the time of writing
the story, he feels his life is all but over. Like many first-person narrators, he has become not only
older but also wiser. Looking back on his life, he realizes that he made many mistakes, especially in his
behavior towards his wife Kathy. The story's first-person narrative situation is uniquely suited for
presenting Harry's insights about his wasted life.
The story is told in a straightforwardly chronological manner, and its timeline can be established quite
accurately (see 4.8 ). The story's action begins with Harry's and Kathy's "walk up Snakey Wood" (135).
Kathy leaves Harry after six years, when he is thirty (136); so, at the beginning he must be twenty-
four. Since "it's [...] twenty-eight years since I got married" (135), the narrating-I's current age must
be fifty-two. Kathy's weekly visits begin after a ten-year interval (139), when Harry is forty. Kathy's
visits continue for six years (147), and when she dies, terminating the primary story line, the
experiencing I is forty-six. A number of historical allusions indicate that Harry's and Kathy's final six
years are co-extensive with World War II (140, 147). The narrative act itself takes place in 1951, six
years after Kathy's death.
The story's action episodes focus on Kathy, picking out their first sexual encounter, the violent quarrel
that makes her run away, her return ten years later, her ensuing weekly visits, the repeated pawning
of the fishing-boat picture, and her death and funeral. Throughout their relationship, Harry "doesn't
get ruffled at anything" (136), and he remains unemotional and indifferent to the point of lethargy. To
the younger Harry, marriage means "only that I changed one house and one mother for a different
house and a different mother" (136). Although he never sets foot from Nottingham (139), his main
idea of a good time is reading books about far-away countries like India (137) and Brazil (139). He
cannot even cry at Kathy's funeral ("No such luck", 148). And yet, her ignoble death – in a state of
drunkenness she is run over by a lorry – causes a change in him. Now he cannot forget her as he did
after she left him (139-140); the only thing he can do is obsessively review the mistakes he made. In
the final retrospective epiphany, he realizes three things with devastating clarity: that he loved Kathy
but never showed it, that he was insensitive to her need for emotional involvement and
communication, and that her death robbed him of a purpose in life.
The theme of becoming aware of one's own flaws can be treated well in a first-person narrative
situation. Unlike the ordinary well-spoken authorial narrator, who cannot himself be present as a
character in the story, Harry's working-class voice and diction is a functional and characteristic feature
in Sillitoe's story. His self-consciousness in telling the story ("I'd rather not make what I'm going to
write look foolish by using dictionary words" 135) and his involvement in the story support the theme
of developing self-recognition. In fact, it is the very process of telling his own story that helps Harry to
re-evaluate his past life and thoughts. And it is important to Harry not only to tell his story to an
anonymous audience but in a sense also to himself. The text's dialogic quality comes out in one of its
key passages:
I was born dead; I keep telling myself. Everybody's dead, I answer. So they are, I maintain, but then most of
them never know it like I'm beginning to do, and it's a bloody shame that this has come to me at last when I
could least do with it, and when it's too bloody late to get anything but bad from it. (149)
Here Harry explicitly "keeps telling himself", "answer[s]" his own indictment, and "maintain[s]" a
position, stressing the self-reflective and auto-therapeutic function of his narrative. In fact, the
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devastating judgment "I was born dead" takes up Kathy's calling him a "dead-'ed" (137) in the quarrel
that leads to their separation. Unfortunately, now that he has learned his lesson, it is "too bloody late".
As a working-class story with occasional snippets of slang and dialect, its references to the characters'
ordinary lives, their brief bouts of passion, aggression and violence ("this annoyed me, so I clocked her
one" 137), Sillitoe's story is neither sentimental nor overly didactic, nor does it offer an idealized
portrayal of working-class characters; it certainly does not allow the reader to feel superior. On the
contrary, the protagonist's matter-of-fact account creates a strong sense of empathy, and his
reflections on a wasted past and a meaningless future clearly express a general human condition.
9.2. Heterodiegetic multiple focalization in Patrick White's The Solid Mandala
The following edited extract from Jahn (2007) analyses the focalization structure of Patrick White's
novel. Multiple focalization (3.2.5) is a technique that allows the narrator to juxtapose the colored
percepts of the novel's two main characters. Readers, in turn, must continuously assess the evidence
using their own mindsets and ultimately come to an overall evaluation and synthesis. Note, the term
apperception as used in the following is a synonym for what we are here preferring to call 'seeing X as
Y' (3.2.9). Page numbers refer to the Penguin edition of 1969.
White's third-person (heterodiegetic) novel, first published in 1966, is set in Sarsaparilla, near Sidney,
Australia. It tells the story of two unmarried twin brothers, Waldo and Arthur Brown, who never parted
company in their lives. There are four chapters. Chapter 1 is a prologue in which the two twins, now in
their late sixties, slovenly in appearance and failing in health, are seen on their customary morning
walk by two ladies on a bus. The narrator's recording device is located very close to the two ladies,
registering what they say, perceive, and think. The result is an opportunistic mix of narratorial and
internal focalization, often poking fun at the characters:
The eyes of the two women followed the tunnel which led inward, through the ragged greenery and sudden
stench of crushed weeds. You could hide behind a bush if necessary. (14)
Both focalization and tone stand in sharp contrast to what follows in the next two chapters, entitled
"Waldo" and "Arthur," respectively. Chapter 2, by far the longest chapter in the book (sixty-three
percent of the text), is focalized exclusively through Waldo, while Chapter 3 (twenty-six percent) is
focalized exclusively through Arthur. Chapter 4 is a brief epilogue that uses three reflectors for the
resolution of the plot.
In chapters 2 and 3 perception and apperception vary with the different mindsets of the respective
reflector characters. Conscious of having descended from upper-class English forebears on his
mother's side, Waldo tends to be critical of everything – the Australian environment, the small-town
inhabitants, and his brother, whom he considers a half-wit. Entering Waldo's apperceptions and
thoughts, the reader soon notices that Waldo's mind is only tangentially concerned with the present
because everything he sees in the present reminds him of events that happened in the past – his life
with his parents (now long dead), his relations to professional and private acquaintances (among them
the girl Dulcie, whom he had once proposed to but was rejected), and growing up and getting old with
his brother Arthur. In fact, around eighty percent of Waldo's chapter is concerned with the offline
perception produced by his spontaneous recollections. These passages of retrospection constitute what
Genette calls 'subjective analepses' – reflector flashbacks – and although they get to us in the
associative order of Waldo's consciousness, they cumulatively supply the pieces that make up this
reflector's biography and personality.
As the psychonarratologists Marisa Bortolussi and Peter Dixon have pointed out, when readers
negotiate a reflector-mode text and become privy to the working of a reflector's mind, they have a
natural inclination to empathize and identify with the character concerned. True as this may be in
general terms and under experimental conditions, in White's novel the reader's relationship to Waldo
does not remain harmonious or 'consonant' for long. Waldo may be intelligent and erudite, but he is
also egoistic, narcissistic – at one point we can observe him kissing a mirror – and entirely lacking in
humor. His life, as it plays back in his recollections, is a relentless series of professional and personal
failures. Symptomatically, the loved girl's features change chameleon-like from attractiveness to
ugliness depending on whether Waldo believes she appreciates or scorns him. Because Waldo's outlook
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on life is so plainly warped and self-deceptive, the reader tends to laugh, with the narrator, at Waldo's
unlikely representations and overblown literary aspirations. Referring to one of his "literary notes,"
Waldo reflects that "[n]ot even Goethe, a disagreeable, egotistical man and overrated writer, whom he
had always detested, could have equalled Waldo's dazzled morning moon" (130). At the same time the
reader is also liminally aware that beneath the text's dissonant humor there lies a serious personality
disorder which poses a gathering threat to the character's environment in general, and to his brother
in particular. As Waldo's apperceptions become ever more schizoid and addled with hate, a minor
frustration finally precipitates an explosive outburst. Turning to his brother with the intention to
strangle him, Waldo perceives Arthur's face as "Opening. Coming apart. Falling" (214). Abruptly,
Chapter 2 terminates at this point.
By this time, the reader has long suspected that Arthur is not the idiot Waldo takes him to be, and
Chapter 3, now focalized entirely through Arthur, gives us an opportunity to see what he is really like.
Arthur's mind now serves as the balancing filter through which many of the episodes earlier
remembered by Waldo are revisited, and this produces the juxtaposition of contrary apperceptions
characteristic of multiple focalization. In a sense, Arthur's outlook on life is as exotic as Waldo's
because Arthur is indeed retarded intellectually and deviant behaviorally. But unlike Waldo, Arthur has
many redeeming qualities: he has a head for figures, he is practical-minded and entrusted with taking
care of everyday chores, and most of the time he has a just sense of what not to do. Above all, what
makes him deviant also makes him endearing: a "man and child" (311), he retains a child-like simple-
mindedness, inquisitiveness, impulsiveness, perceptiveness, and creativeness. In the storyworld itself,
sensitive people are as attracted to Arthur as they are repelled by Waldo. And while one laughs at
Waldo's distortions, Arthur's strange visions are often oddly appropriate:
Suddenly Arthur burst into tears because he saw that Waldo was what the books referred to as a lost soul. He,
too, for that matter, was lost. Although he might hold Waldo in his arms, he could never give out from his soul
enough of that love which was there to give. So his brother remained cold and dry. (284)
Significantly, it is Arthur who sees the mystic pattern of the mandala, which symbolizes the
harmonious union or mingling of opposites, in the speckled "taws" (marbles) which he likes to give to
people he is fond of. Naturally, critics have also found the mandala pattern in the novel's bonding of
the two unlike brothers.
Waldo's and Arthur's chapters differ in one important technical detail. While Waldo's flashbacks are
linked to the current here and now, Arthur's chapter represents a single long stretch of subjective
analepsis without any clue as to when or in what situation it unfolds. Compelled to fill in the gap, the
reader is likely to fall back on the not entirely unusual motif of a dying (or possibly even dead) man's
summary recollection of his life (as used, for instance, in the film American Beauty or in Stevie Smith's
poem "Not waving but drowning"; see Haller 2019 on the topic of "postmortal narration"). Naturally, it
is an assumption that charges the text with emotion and tragedy – and leads to a considerable
surprise when it turns out to be false. As the chapter recounts Waldo's mortal attack from Arthur's
point of view we learn that it is Waldo who dies – of a stroke brought on by the exertion of trying to kill
his brother. In Chapter 4, after Waldo's body has been found by a neighbor, Arthur accuses himself of
having killed Waldo, but it is clear that what he means is that he was unable to prevent Waldo from
killing himself. At the end of the novel, as Arthur is sent to a mental home, we have a double tragedy
on our hands, pitying Arthur for failing to save Waldo, and finally also pitying Waldo because Arthur
has taught us how to do so.
The foregoing thumbnail sketch of The Solid Mandala illustrates how strategic choices in focalization
determine this novel's structure especially in its two contrapuntal chapters, characterization (opening
up several viewpoints on the characters), and its surprise outcome. Above all, the novel's multiple
focalization motivates the reader to re-read the text in order to compare the many twice-told events,
to reconstrue the personalities of the characters, and to appreciate the many leitmotifs and contrasts.
Any reader interested in an in-depth unraveling of these features might wish to consult Gordon
Collier's 500-page study of the novel, which is a masterpiece of scholarly analysis and narratological
criticism (Collier 1992b). Collier excellently demonstrates the breadth and variety of reflector-mode
narration, especially when grounded in oppositional focalizers such as Waldo and Arthur.
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9.3. Immersion with a vengeance: Siegfried's last tale
The following (edited) extract has been copied from a 2003 essay entitled "'Awake! Open your eyes!'
The Cognitive Logic of External and Internal Stories". In it, I investigated how past events and stories
are stored as 'internal' stories in memory and recalled, rearranged, and 'externalized' again for public
telling. Siegfried's last tale highlights a rather unique first-person focalization scenario. Ostensibly
telling a story of personal experience Siegfried's past story-here-and-now suddenly becomes the
teller's present here-and-now – a lucky find for the narratologist, but a fatal turn for the hero.
All of Richard Wagner's operas run on elaborate plots, and the Ring tetralogy, which weaves and binds
the fates of generations, races, and worlds, has the most tightly knitted plot of all. Anything worth
mentioning is directly or indirectly related to everything else. Tightly knitted plots encourage
storytelling, and story-telling takes up much of the opera's time and action. Often, the second-order
stories told by the characters merely serve the standard function of exposition and reminder,
sometimes they trigger major courses of action, and occasionally they stand as central moments of
action itself. Act III, Scene 2 of Götterdämmerung is one the latter cases, but it begins harmlessly
enough with a story told for the manifest purpose of entertaining and distracting King Gunther, who is
going through a marital crisis. Here is the twist: in a moment, the story will get out of hand, and its
teller will be killed for telling it. These are storytelling circumstances of a special nature, and they are
compounded by the fact that the teller will never return to the original level of online mentation from
which he set out.
Though not a born storyteller, Siegfried's heroic standing assures access to a rich store of tellable
stories of personal experience, and it needs only a little priming to set him off. "People say you
understand the language of birds", Hagen, his secret enemy, prompts him, and, like many storytellers,
Siegfried begins not in medias res but by going back a bit, knowing well enough that while one thing
leads to another it is, in turn, caused by something that happened earlier. He therefore begins by
relating how he once forged himself a sword; how he used it to kill a dragon; how he found the
dragon's hoard, taking from it an invisibility hood and, of course, the one magical ring that gives you
the power to rule the world, but always only at a cost (why does this sound familiar?); how, bathing in
the dragon's blood he became invulnerable (almost!) to external weapons; how, tasting the dragon's
blood, he began to comprehend the language of birds, and how, understanding what a little bird told
him, he was able to dispose of an evil dwarf who was out to poison him. Yet there is a complication to
Siegfried's storytelling, a complication of which the audience knows all and the character knows
nothing. Despite the fact that everything is tied up with everything else, Siegfried's recall is not total
because he has earlier been tricked into consuming a magic drink that made him forget one particular
episode, namely, how our beamish boy met a girl . Now he is offered another drink, and this time it is
the counterpotion "to refresh your memory", as Hagen duplicitously puts it, already anticipating the
likely consequence. Music pauses dramatically; potion takes effect. Suddenly, Siegfried finds himself
narrating a sequel which he, only a moment ago, had not known to have existed – how the little bird
led him to a mountain encircled by a wall of fire. How, overcoming the wall of fire he found a sleeping
warrior woman going by the name of Brünnhilde. How he kissed her, as the rules of folklore demand
that he do, and how she woke up and smiled at him.
What makes the story gripping at this point is the fact that the sudden re-experience of the forgotten
incident entirely floods the narrator's consciousness, blocking out all real-world circumstances –
particularly the fact that he is at present engaged to be married to another woman, has indeed sworn
that there never was another woman in his life. In a word, telling this story perjures the teller and
gives Hagen the political legitimacy to run a spear through the one chink in the hero's armor. Mortally
wounded, and already beyond reaction or defense, Siegfried continues telling the story, transposing to
an offline wish-fulfillment fantasy that replays the sleeping-beauty scene. These are his final words
(translation L. Salter):
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Brünnhilde, Brünnhilde,
heilige Braut! holy bride!
Wach auf! Öffne dein Auge! Awake! Open your eyes!
Wer verschloß dich Who sank you
wieder in Schlaf? again in sleep?
Wer band dich in Schlummer so bang? Who shackled you in uneasy slumber?
Der Wecker kam; Your wakener came
er küßt dich wach, and kissed you awake,
und aber der Braut and again broke
bricht er die Bande the bride's bondage:
da lacht ihm Brünnhildes Lust! Brünnhilde laughed in delight at him!
Ach, dieses Auge, Ah, her eyes,
ewig nun offen! forever open!
Ach, dieses Atems Ah, the blissful stirring
wonniges Wehen! of her breath!
Süßes Vergehen, Sweet passing,
seliges Grauen - blessed terror -
Brünnhild' bietet mir - Gruß! Brünnhilde bids me welcome!
Climaxing in lustful oxymorons, Siegfried meets his fate. It is a strange end to a none-too-bright
character, a hero who was never more than a pawn in the power games played by agents of superior
knowledge, and a figure absurdly defenseless against the malice of magic potions. Still, one must grant
there are worse things than to die remembering the best moment of your life, and believing it to have
come round a second time, and telling the story of it, too. Not to mention the fact that the composer
salutes his hero's exitus with a grand funeral march and a triumphant recall of his personal leitmotif
[Georg Solti video clip]. Clinging to the detail of the scene, the speaker's language reverberates with
waves of emotion. Although manifestly engaged in the mode of retrospective first-person narration,
the teller makes the striking mistake of counting the re-lived experience as a second occurrence of the
event. "Who sank you again in sleep", he asks (both himself and his imaginatively present bride), and
then continues to tell himself and his audience that he must again break "the bride's bondage"
(actually "the bride" is now Gunther's wife, but no matter). The discourse's conflicting impulses now
not only affect the deictics of pronouns and referring expressions but also the tenses. The shift from
past to present (line 8 of the original text; line 18 in the translation) can be understood as a perfectly
regular shift into the historical present, used in the standard function of foregrounding a significant
moment. On the other hand, the present tense is clearly also the natural mode of directly reported
experience, of what Cohn has called 'simultaneous narration' (3.3.11). Aware as he is of continuing his
tale, the speaker's discourse attempts to negotiate a twofold orientation: of directly addressing
Brünnhilde in the second person and telling about her in the third. The speaker himself is past being
able to tell the difference between what is real and what is imaginary, nor, indeed, does he care,
whereas the audience, supposing it gets the deictic signals right, knows that Brünnhilde's second
awakening is a perception produced and reinforced by the teller's own narrative. Baffling as it is,
Siegfried's last speech teaches us a prime lesson about the nature and machinery of immersive
storytelling.
9.4. Conversational storytelling in Billy Wilder's The Apartment
Here is another case analysis, also copied from the 2003 essay. In it, I made an attempt to analyze the
dialogic relationship between two second-order stories (2.4.2 ) as told in a movie.
In Tell Me a Story , Roger Schank presents a fine example of intelligent conversational storytelling.
Schank is mainly interested in how a story told by speaker A reminds hearer B of a story of his or her
own, and how speaker B's subsequent narrative response pursues certain pragmatic goals. In the
scene from Wilder's film, Bud Baxter (Jack Lemmon) has barely managed to save Fran Kubelik (Shirley
McLaine) from committing suicide. Earlier, she had told him the story of her "talent for falling in love
with the wrong guy in the wrong place at the wrong time". This reminds Bud of a story in which he is
the protagonist:
I know how you feel, Miss Kubelik. You think it's the end of the world – but it's not, really. I went through
exactly the same thing myself. Well maybe not exactly – I tried to do it with a gun. She was the wife of my
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best friend, and I was mad for her. But I knew it was hopeless – so I decided to end it all. I went to a
pawnshop and bought a .45 automatic, and drove up to Eden Park – do you know Cincinnati? Anyway, I
parked the car and loaded the gun – well, you read in the papers all the time that people shoot themselves, but
believe me, it's not that easy – I mean, how do you do it? Here or here or here [with cocked finger, he points to
his temple, mouth, and chest]. You know where I finally shot myself? [Indicates knee.] Here. While I was
sitting there, trying to make my mind up, a cop stuck his head in the car, because I was illegally parked – so I
started to hide the gun under the seat and it went off – pow! Took me a year before I could bend my knee –
but I got over the girl in three weeks. She still lives in Cincinnati, has four kids, gained twenty pounds – she –
Here's the fruitcake. [Shows it to her under Christmas tree.] And you want to see my knee? (qtd Schank 1995:
42-43)
Being reminded of something, Schank argues, is like searching a database of indexes to stories in
memory. Whether something reminds one of a story partly depends on the quality of the index which
was generated when the story was originally prepared for possible recall. However, as Schank points
out, being able to access an efficient relational database is only one aspect of intelligent storytelling.
Equally important is how a speaker manages to adapt a story to the pragmatic needs of the situation.
Bud Baxter excels in this area. One of his main 'YOU-goals' is to get across a piece of sensible advice –
namely, that drastic action isn't always the proper cure. In addition to this, Bud also pursues a number
of less obvious 'ME -goals' – from the simple goal of 'getting attention', which usually attends all story-
telling (Schank 1995: 43), to the more specific goals of establishing himself as a humorous person, an
ideal confidant, and a better candidate than the married men in Ms. Kubelik's life.
Ms. Kubelik's own story, which precedes Bud's story and in which she confesses to her fatal attraction
to married men, is just as significant an example of conversational storytelling because it lets her
hearer get a glimpse of the psychological dilemma she is caught up in. While Schank mainly focuses on
the cathartic intention of her confession, the story also presents a 'life script' (this is Eric Berne's term,
not to be confused with Schank's own script concept). This script contains a sequence of roles and
action patterns which Fran Kubelik feels compelled to enact and repeat until it either works out in a
happy ending or climaxes in a catastrophe (the latter is the more likely outcome). The existential plight
created by malign scripts is well understood in Bernean transactional psychology, and it is no
coincidence, perhaps, that it frequently reoccurs as a trait of character in Wilder's films. To bring out
the scripted nature of obsessive behavior it is standard procedure for the transactional therapist to
inquire after the patient's favorite fairy tale (Berne 1973: 435). To which Ms. Kubelik might well reply,
Beauty and the Beast (cp Berne's note on the tale, 1973: 47). The tale's script, as internalized by Ms.
Kubelik, might instruct her to look out for, and have an affair with, a disguised Prince. Sooner or later,
the Prince transforms into a married beast and abandons her, happy endings being less frequent in real
life than in fairy tales. Eventually, not having the strength to repeat the familiar moves of the script,
she will try to commit suicide, as she does in the film. Potent as Ms. Kubelik's script is, it is the perfect
cue for Bud Baxter's intelligent narrative response, which reveals the script's flaws and at the same
time suggests a viable alternative.
[85]
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ResearchGate has not been able to resolve any citations for this publication.
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![Arleen Ionescu]()
This is the Introduction to volume 9 (2009) of Word and Text - A Journal of Literary Studies and Linguistics that I co-edited with Laurent Milesi and Biwu Shang. The articles included in this issue can be accessed at http://jlsl.upg-ploiesti.ro/site_engleza/No_1_2019.html. The issue includes: Arleen Ionescu: Postclassical Narratology: Twenty Years Later GENERAL PERSPECTIVES Brian Richardson: Recent Work in Unnatural Narrative Studies Biwu Shang: Postclassical Narratology in China: Receptions and Variations John Pier: Is There a French Postclassical Narratology? THEMATIC DEPARTURES Samuel Caleb Wee: Songs of 'Experientiality': Reconsidering the Relationship between Poeticity and Narrativity in Postclassical Narratology Charlotte Lindemann: Dialogue and the Limits of Narrative Discourse: Gérard Genette, Gertrude Stein Florian Zitzelsberger: On the Queer Rhetoric of Metalepsis Xiaomeng Wan: Body as Resource of Narrative Communication: An Intersection of Corporeal Narratology with Rhetorical Narratology READINGS Vladimir Biti: Almost the Same but not Quite: Kafka and His Assignees Yili Tang: Character Narration and Fictionality in Julian Barnes's Flaubert's Parrot REVIEWS Yuzhen Lin: A Comparative Perspective on Unnaturalness: A Review of Biwu Shang's Unnatural Narrative across Borders: Transnational and Comparative Perspectives Fang Cai: A Discipline with Local Characteristics and a Global Perspective: Zhong Guo Xu Shi Xue [Chinese Narratology]
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![Jens Eder]()
Figuren sind für Spielfilme und das Erleben der Zuschauer von zentraler Bedeutung. Dieses Buch stellt das bislang umfassendste Modell zur Untersuchung von Filmfiguren in ihren vielfältigen Formen und Funktionen vor. Um dafür eine neuartige Grundlage zu schaffen, wurden die Erkenntnisse verschiedener Disziplinen integriert und auf einen griffigen Kern verdichtet: die "Uhr der Figur".
Which Feminist Themes Do These Two Passages Have In Common? Check All Of The Boxes That Apply.
Source: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/344239602_Narratology_23_A_Guide_to_the_Theory_of_Narrative
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