Narratology
Telling stories
Narratology is the study of narrative structures, meaning it is not the reading and interpretation of individual
stories, but an attempt to study the nature of a ‘story’ itself. An important part of narratology is the distinction
between ‘story’ and ‘plot’, story is the chronological order of events, and plot is those same events ordered,
edited and presented as a narrative.
Aristotle
Aristotle identifies two elements as essential in a story: action and character. He also says that the character
should be revealed through action. Aristotle identifies three key plot elements: ‘the hamartia’, ‘the anagnorisis’
and ‘the peripeteia’. Or in other words: ‘a tragic flaw’, ‘a moment of self-recognition’ and ‘a reversal of fortune’.
These three elements can be distributed to the ‘protagonist’ but can also be divided amongst multiple
characters.
Vladimir Propp
Propp was a Russian Formalist critic who worked on Russian folk tales and identifying their recurrent structures
and situations. He based his study on a hundred tales and concluded that by picking from thirty-one functions
you could construct the base narrative for any Russian folk tale. These 31 functions always occur in order listed.
Propp considered the characters in stories mainly just the mechanism for distributing the functions around the
story. He also identified seven main roles which can be filled by one or multiple agents. Propp’s theories can
also be applied to other types of stories. Propp’s system lacks anything about the way the narrative is
presented, such as the viewpoint or the style.
Gérard Genette
A narratologist whose work has how a story is told as its focus. Genette discusses six different areas, starting
with ‘mimesis’ and ‘diegesis’. Respectively meaning ‘slow telling’ (seeing and hearing things ourselves) and
‘telling’ (a rapid summarising way of telling a story – the narrator just says what happens without showing it).
Writers use these ways of storytelling alternatingly, in longer forms of media especially mimesis and diegesis
need each other to tell a compelling story. s
Genette’s second point is ‘Focalisation’. Which concerns the point-of-view from which the story is told.
Examples are ‘external’ focalisation and ‘internal’ focalisation. With external focalisation we are told only thing
which are external or observable. Internal focalisation focusses on what characters think and feel. If a story is
told through internal focalisation on one character, that character can be called the ‘focaliser’. Another form of
narration is ‘zero focalisation’, where the consumer is privy to the thoughts and feelings of all characters the
writer wishes (also known as ‘omniscient narration’). One kind of narrator can remain just a voice or an
intelligent, recording consciousness. The other kind of narrator is a distinct named character, and this can be
split into heterodiegetic and homodiegetic narrators. A heterodiegetic narrator is not a character in the story
they narrate (but still a named ‘in universe’ character). A homodiegetic narrator is narrating their own story.
Omniscient narrators are always heterodiegetic. Another area Genette handles is time, specifically flash backs,
and flash forwards, he notes that these story elements can be important in establishing themes.
Next Genette talks about ‘frame narratives’ and ‘embedded narratives’ those being terms for stories withing
stories. These ‘meta-narratives’ can be ‘single-ended’, ‘double-ended’ or ‘intrusive’, alluding to how much the
embedded narrative gets interrupted by the frame narrative. Lastly Genette talks about the different ways
speech can be represented. ‘direct and tagged’, ‘direct and untagged’, ‘direct and selectively tagged’, ‘tagged
indirect speech’ and ‘free indirect speech’.