Comentario de Texto Literario Narrative

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leeyre_21
Comentario de Textos Literarios en Lengua Inglesa
1º Grado en Estudios Ingleses
Facultad de Filosofía y Letras

Universidad de Zaragoza
Reservados todos los derechos.

No se permite la explotación económica ni la transformación de esta obra. Queda permitida la impresión en su totalidad.
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NARRATIVE
PARTICIPANTS OTHER ELEMENTS

TIME - Level
- Narrator
• Features - Time of narration • Extradiegetic
o Reliability • Subsequent • Intradiegetic
o Distance • Prior • Metadiegetic
o Overtness • Simultaneous (embedded
o Consciousness • Interpolated narrative)
o Knowledge - Story time vs narrative time - Closure
• Status • Order - Characterization
o Heterodiegetic+ extradiegetic o Analepsis • Explicit
o Homodiegetic+ extradiegetic o Prolepsis • Implicit
o Heterodiegetic+ intradiegetic • Duration - Representation of speech
o Homodiegetic+ intradiegetic o Ellipsis and thought
- Focalilzer o Summary • Direct style
• Internal o Scene • Indirect style
• External o Pause • Free direct style
- Characters o Slow-down • Free indirect style
• Round • Frequency • Interior monologue
• Flat o Singulative - Events
- Narratee o Repetitive • Primary events
- Implied author o Iterative • Secondary events
Reservados todos los derechos. No se permite la explotación económica ni la transformación de esta obra. Queda permitida la impresión en su totalidad.
NARRATIVE DISCOURSE AND NARRATIVE TEXT
Narrative and life
- Narrative is a distinctive human trait, a ‘deep structure’

- Presence of narrative in almost every human discourse (e.g myths, novel, fable, play,
painting, cinema, news items, ballad, conversation…)
- ‘Narrative is intentional, transhistorical, transcultural: it is simply there, like life itself’
(Roland Barthes)
- Memory itself might be dependent on the capacity for narrative
Narrative and time
- Narrative is the principal way in which our species organizes its understanding of time
- Story time (clock time) vs Narrative time (discourse time):
a) The children fell down. After a while she got up and ran, until at last, seeing
her mother, she burst into tears: “I fell down”, she cried. “There, there,” said
the mother. “That must have hurt”
Story time (clock time): time is comprised of a succession of events that appears as links in a chain (the
fall, the getting up, the running, the seeing of the mother, the bursting into tears, what she said, and
what her mother said). Clock time always relates to itself, so that one speaks in terms of numbers of
seconds.
b) The child fell down. She sat where she had fallen, her eyes frightened, her
lower lip trembling. She rubbed her knee. Was it bleeding? No, but the skin
was scraped. Where was her mother? Carefully, she got to her feet and stared
running… “There, there”, said her mother, “that must have hurt”
Narrative time (discourse time): the amount of time it takes a reader to read a passage. It has an
accumulation of detail, words and information.
Defining narrative
- The representation of an event or a series of events

- A telling of some true or fictitious event or connected sequence of events, recounted by
a narrator to a narratee. A narrative will consist of a set of events (the story) recounted in
process of narration (or narrative discourse), in which the events are selected and arranged
in a particular order (the plot)
Chrono-logic of narrative
- Two kinds of time and two kinds of order

- ‘Chrono-logic’ of narrative (Seymour Chatman):
• Movement through time externally: the duration of the representation, the
accumulation of detail (narrative/discourse time)
→ Shaped by narrative discourse, by complexity of detail
• Movement through time internally: the duration and order of the sequence of
the events (story/clock time)—measured in minutes
→ Determined by the story, by the events
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Story and Narrative discourse
- Story: abstractly conceived raw material of events

→ characterized by: fixed order + its own length of time, chronological sequence
- Narrative discourse: representation of the events, the telling itself
→ characterized by: malleability + narrative time (which can expand and contract, leap
backward and forward)
Story and plot
- Alternative distinction within narrative, derived from Russian Formalism

- Story (fabula) vs Plot (sjuzet) – for the Russian
• Fabula: full sequence of events and we assume them to have occurred
• Sjuzet: particular selection and ordering of the events, finished arrangement of
narrated events as they are presented to the reader
→ notion of szujet is less inclusive term than narrative discourse
→ “Plot”: commonly used as a synonym of “story”
The mediation (construction) of the story
- The story does not exist directly, only through representation

- Presentation/ representation
- A story is always mediated by narrative discourse
→A story can travel from one representation to another and remain recognized as the
same story (= adaptation)
- A narrative is a construction (the reader constructs it from the narrative discourse;

through reading the narrative discourse, we recreate a map of the story in our minds)
Constituent and Supplementary events
- Constituent events: - Supplementary events:

• Necessary for the story • Not necessary for the story
• Constitute the story itself • Do not drive the story
• Move the story forward forward
• If removed, the story
would remain the same
→important for the meaning and
overall impact of the story
- Change vs recurrence
Narrativity
- It is the quality or set of properties that distinguish a narrative into a higher register.
(The felling of someone “telling a story”, of a performance, a narrative “for its own
sake”)

NARRATION
Narrative voice
- It is Who we “hear doing” the narrating

- Not to be confused with the voice of the author (flesh and bone= carne y hueso) or
that of the implied author (inferred as the responsible authority)
- Major element in the construction of a story (it is the voice assumed telling the story)
- It is a narrative device used as an imagined voice to transmit the story
Features of the Narrative voice
- Reliability (reliable/ unreliable narrator)

• Reliable narrator: a narrator whose words said about the story are assumed to
be true
• Unreliable narrator: a narrator whose account of events appears to be faulty,
misleadingly biased, or otherwise distorted, so that it departs from the “true”
understanding of events shared between the reader and the implied author
- Distance
• Degree of involvement in the event
• Tone and attitude toward events and characters (irony, empathy…)
- Degree of overtness (how for some people is the personality of the narrator)
• Overt narrator:
✓ distinctive voice and personality
✓ refers to him/herself directly
✓ addressees the narratee
✓ shows his/her attitude towards the events and characters or
“intrudes” into the story in order to pass philosophical or
metanarrative comments (intrusive narrator)
• Covert narrator:
✓ Identified by no more than a neutral and non-distinctive voice
✓ Does not intrude or interfere
- Degree of self-consciousness: self-reflectiveness towards the act of narrating, of
telling a story
- Knowledge omniscience (omniscient narrator)/ restriction
• Range: number of characters
• Depth: actions, mental processes

Status of the narrator
- On the basis of the narrator’s relationship to the diegesis (story)

• Homodiegetic narrator: the narrator participates as a character in the story
• Autodiegetic narrator: the narrator is the protagonist of his/her own story
• Heterodiegetic narrator: the narrator does not participate as a character in the
story
→ avoid terms 1st-person narrator, 3rd-person narrator (mal examen)
- On the basis of the narrative level to which the narrator belongs
• Extradiegetic narrator: primary narrator/ outside the diegesis (story)
• Intradiegetic narrator: secondary narrator/ inside the diegesis (story)/ if a
character in the diegesis becomes the narrator, an embedded narrative occurs
→ conclusion: 4 basic types of narrator’s status
- Extradiegetic + heterodiegetic narrator: a primary narrator who tells a story he/she is

absent from
- Extradiegetic+ homodiegetic narrator: a primary narrator who tells his/her own story
- Intradiegetic+ heterodiegetic narrator: a secondary narrator who tells a story he/she is
on the whole absent from
- Intradiegetic+ homodiegetic narrator: a secondary narrator who tells his/her own story
Narrative levels
- Narratives usually have several levels

- Any event a narrative recount is at a diegetic level immediately lower than the level at
which the narrating act producing this narrative is placed
- At least 2 levels (always)
• Extradiegetic level (narrative discourse): primary narration
• Intradiegetic level (story world)
→possibility of adding embedded narrative within the intradiegetic

level: metadiegetic level (secondary narration)
Embedded narrative
- When a character in a narrative begins telling a story

- Metadiegetic level—intradiegetic narrator
The time of narration
- It is the temporal position of the narrator

- Subsequent (or ulterior) narration:
• The report of events after they happen
• Marked by the use of past tenses
• The most usual and conventional time of narration
- Prior (or anterior) narration:
• A reference to events before they happen
• Marked by future and conditional tenses
• Often used for short blocks embedded within the main story (prophecies,
premonitions…)
- Simultaneous narration:
• A story told as the events unfold
• Marked by the use of present tenses
• Effect of immediacy and spatial closeness (happening right in front our eyes)
- Interpolated narration
• Combines subsequent and simultaneous narration
• Present/past tenses
• Used in epistolary narratives, narratives in the form of diaries
• More than one narrative level
• Narration of earlier events combined with a reflection on their current
meaning

FOCALIZATION AND SUBJECTIVITY
Focalization
- Distinction between voice (speaking subjectivity) and vision (perceiving subjectivity)

- “The position or vantage-point from which the events of a story seem to be observed
and presented to us”
- Textual function: determines the selection and restriction of narrative information
relative to the focalizer’s knowledge, perception and point of view
- Influences the meaning that the reader will assign to events and characters:
• We tend to identify and emphasize with the point of view that is provided
• Focalization as the most subtle means of manipulating the information
- Sensory and psychological perception, but also mindset, worldview, attitude,
preferences, values, ideological orientations, etc.
- Different degrees of objectivity/ subjectivity
Types of focalization (Mieke Bal)
- Depending on the position of the focalizer

• Internal focalization: a participant of the story→ restriction of knowledge,
greater degree of unreliability and subjectivity
• External focalization: external approach, bird’s eye or panoramic view—
greater degree of reliability and objectivity
- Depending on the nature of localized objects
• Perceptible objects: can be perceived by hypothetical spectator
• Non-perceptible objects: cannot be observed (e.g character’s mind)

TECHNIQUES FOR THE REPRESENTATION OF SPEECH AND THOUGHT
Introduction
- Narrator’s discourse/ character’s discourse

- Techniques to tackle the management and embedding of character’s speech and
thought
- Differing degrees of conventionalization and smoothing out of natural disfluencies of
real speech
- Replace the expressive possibilities of voices (in terms of accent, tone…)
- Identification and individualization of speakers
Direct style
- Direct quotation of a character’s speech (direct speech) or (verbalized) thought (direct

thought)
- Associated with showing (with some filtering) and with internal focalization
- Enclosed within quotation marks
- Introduced or followed by a reporting clause
Ex: He leaned forward and said; ‘I’m going to give you another chance, Anne’
- Open to the possibility of comment or evaluation on the narrator’s part
- Use of vernacular forms, colloquialisms, slang… to represent the voice of the character
Indirect style
- Indirect representation of a character’s words or thoughts embedded into the

narrator’s discourse
- High filtering (mediation)
- Associated with telling rather than showing and with external focalization
- Integrated as a subordinate clause introduced by a reporting verb
Ex: Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself
- Paraphrase rather than reproduction of words
- Generally, summarizes, interpretates, and grammatically straightens the character’s
language
- Pronouns, tenses and temporal and spatial references are adapted to the point of view
of the narrator
Free direct style
- Direct quotation of character’s speech (direct speech) or (verbalized) thought (direct

thought)
- Hardly any intrusion of filtering by the narrator
- Little description of who is speaking or how
- Associated with showing and with internal focalization
- Quotation marks
- Lacks a reporting clause to show the shift from narration to reporting (diff btw free
direct style and direct style)

Interior monologue
- Variant of free direct style

- An extended passage of direct thought gives an inside view into a character’s mind
- Function: to represent the stream of consciousness of characters:
• Textual rendering of mental processes that seeks to capture their random
irregular, disjointed, associative and incoherent nature
→ Its aim is to invoke the uninterrupted flow of thoughts going through the
character’s being, as they are born, and is the other they are born, without any explanation of
logical sequence and giving the impression of “raw” experience
Free indirect style
- Representation of the character’s words or thoughts that blurs the distinction between
the character’s voice (direct style) and the narrative voice (indirect style)
- Features common with the direct style:
• Use of vernacular forms, colloquialisms, slang…
• Direct questions and exclamations
• No reporting verb
• Temporal and spatial references and demonstratives (here, now…)
- Features in common with the indirect style:
• Personal pronouns (3rd person)
• Verb tenses (past tenses)
- Associated with showing and with internal focalization
- More filtering than in direct style, but less than in indirect style
- Allows a heterodiegetic narrative to exploit an internal focalization
Summary
Technique Filtering by narrator Narrative mode Focalization
Free direct style Unfiltered Showing Internal
Direct style Some filtering Showing Internal
Free indirect style More filtering Showing/ telling Internal
Indirect style Most filtering telling External
Showing → "John looked at his wife, his eyebrows pursed, his lips contracted, his fists
clenched. Then he got up, banged the door and left the house”
- the narrative evokes in readers the impression that they are shown the events of the
story or that they somehow witness them
- readers get the impression that they are somehow near the events of the story (“small
distance”)
Telling → “John was angry with his wife”
- the narrative evokes in readers the impression that they are told about the events
- evokes the impression of a “large distance” between readers and the events
INTERPRETING NARRATIVE
Introduction
- Intentional reading: “the ideas and judgments that we are infer from the narrative are
understood to be in keeping with a sensibility that intended these effects”
- Concepts linked to the reader’s process of interpretation:
1. Implied author
2. Reader’s manipulation of the narrative
3. Gaps and cruxes
4. Themes and motives
Implied author
- A textual figure (construct) to which the sensibility (feelings, intelligence, knowledge

and opinion) behind the narrative can be ascribed
- “Source of a work’s design and meaning which is inferred by readers from the text and
imagined as a personality standing behind the work”
- Consistent with all the elements of the narrative discourse that we are aware of
- This figure is assumed to be responsible for how the narrative is constructed and for its
intended meaning
- Serves to anchor the narrative
→the implied author is the sensibility on which the readers base their interpretations
- The author (outside the narrative) ≠ implied author
- Narrator ≠ implied author (different narrative level)

Reader’s manipulation of the narrative
A) Underreading
- Overlooking elements:
• lack of attention
• lack of understanding
- Excluding elements
• for convenience when looking for closure
• to make the text fit a predetermined critical/ theoretical reading
- “The primacy effect”: tendency to privilege our 1st impression even if later, on this
impression, is contradicted in the narrative or in further readings
B) Overreading
- Relying for our interpretation on elements (qualities, motives, moods, ideas,
judgements…) for which there is no direct evidence in the text
→ Both, underreading and overreading may be influenced by our personal contexts

(values, fears, desires, experiences…) and the search for closure
→ Both, underreading and overreading can be reduced to a minimum through text

revision
Gaps and cruxes
- Filled by the reader in order to make sense of the narrative

- Types of gaps
• Temporary: filled in as the narrative advances through the guidance provided
by narrative discourse
• Permanent: ellipses that may lead to the absence of closure
• Cruxes: central and crucial gaps; depending on how we interpret them, the
reading of a work may change
- “It is only through inevitable omissions that a story gains its dynamism”
Themes and motifs
- Repeated elements in a narrative text

- Identifying them usually gives us clues as for interpretation
- Theme
• A silent, abstract idea that emerges from a literary work’s treatment of its
subject-matter (topic)
• It emerges through the recurrence of motifs
- Motif
• Concrete (symbolic) object, image, phrase, situation… that recurs in the
narrative

THE CLASSICAL (REALIST) NARRATIVE PLOT
Main features
- It is plot-oriented (mythos→ Aristoteles) Plot is the most important element
- It centers around a conflict (agon)→ towards resolution
(conflict= central elements of the narrative)
- Structure principles
• Chronology: events usually unfold in chronological order
• Causality: events bring about changes and transformations, leading to a new
order or equilibrium
• Teleology ("end”, “resolution”): events unfold in such a way as to contribute to
a specific aim or end
- Closure: the resolution of the story’s central conflict
(Ex: “for sale: baby shoes, never worn”→ no closure, we don’t know the end)
- Character-centered events; well defined characters
- Spatio-temporal guidance (setting)
- The world is knowable and susceptible of rational enquiry
(It makes sense and it could be understood through logic)
- Moral guidance (textual implications)
- Hierarchy of voices, discourse and narrative levels
→Compliance vs deviation (some conventions are going to be followed while others will
suffer variations)

CLOSURE
What is closure?
- It is the resolution of the story’s central conflict

- Reading is governed by 2 tensions:
• tension between advance and delay of resolution (suspense)
• tension between what we expect and what we don’t (surprise)
- closure is related to a broad range of expectations and questions that we normally
hope to close or resolve
→ Successful narrative: “chains of suspense and surprise that keeps us in a fluctuating

state of impatience, wonderment and partial gratification”
- Roland Barthes’s codes that author and reader share in order to make a narrative
readable:
• Proairetic code: expectations and actions
• Hermenecitic code: questions and answers
- 2 levels at which narrative occurs:
• Level of expectations: how we expect action to unfold in terms of the overcall
code
• Level of questions: the uncertainties that we seek to resolve as the narrative
progresses
- If expectations are fulfilled or questions answered, we say that closure occurs
a) Closure at the level of expectations:

- Expectations are fulfilled
- But 2 imperfectly balanced needs:
• To see expectations fulfilled: generic conventions, masterplots
• To see them violated (surprise): flexibility
b) Closure at the level of questions:
- Questions are answered (enlightenment)
- Steady stream of questions and answers
- Partial answer, red herrings
→ Good narrative: some surprises but also expectations fulfilled
The absence of closure
- Closure ≠ ending: closures does not have to happen

- Openness as a sign of literary and cultural value
- Narrative as a “machine to think with” (Richards)→ (we are forced to make our own
conclusions)
- Ideological and rhetorical power closure:
• Because closure provides satisfaction, relief and clarity to our conclusion
• But some authors may want to frustrate those feelings
CHARACTER AND SELF IN NARRATIVE—TECHNIQUES OF CHARACTERIZATION
Characterization in narrative
- One of the 2 main components in most narratives

- Character vs action
- Character and action are inseparable
- Characters have agency→ they drive the action and reveal who they are
- The stress on character is connected with modern fascination with the individual
- Frequency of eponymous protagonists (main characters that give the name to the
story) ex: Jane Eyre; Charlotte Brontë
Flat vs Round Character→ distinction by E.M Forster
- Characters are usually harder to understand than actions→ from horizontal to vertical
analysis
- Flat characters
• No hidden complexity (limited to a narrow range of predictable behaviors)
• Unchanging (do not develop during the narrative)
- Round characters
• Characterized by various degrees of depth and complexity: conflicting ideas,
feelings and values
• Dynamic (subject to development)
- The choice of flat or round characters are often determined by generic conventions
- The ability to create round characters is an indicator of literary quality
Can characters be real?
- Model of the construction of character:

Narrative + Reader→ reader’s construction of a character
(We construct characters, 2 different people may not have the idea of the same
character)
- Characters are linguistic and discursive constructions
- Characters are built from words and contexts: socio-cultural discourses, assumptions
and expectations + reader’s experiences
- Type: necessary tool to characterize (vs stock character)→ type is the specific
combination of features that allows us to identify a character as a representative of a
group ex: cheerleader= superficial, blonde, mean/ nerd= books, asocial, glasses
- “Characterization by type can accommodate a great deal of human complexity”
Techniques of characterization
- Explicit characterization (= direct definition)→ the narrator or another character

provides information about a character
• Physical, psychological or both
- Implicit characterization (= indirect definition)→ Not explicit description, we need to
infer, interpret form the character’s actions, words or thoughts
• Often psychological
- Characterization varies with narrator’s perspective: empathy/ irony

SIGNIFICANCE AND TREATEMENT OF TIME IN NARRATIVE DISCOURSE
Story time vs Narrative time
- Story time (clock time): the sequence of events and the length of time that passes in
the story (measured through the clock in the story; the time that occurs in the story)
- Narrative time (discourse time): the amount of time it takes a reader to read a
passage. It has an accumulation of detail, words and information
EX: “5 years passed before they met again”→ Short narrative time (7words) / long story
time (5 years)
Characteristics of the Story Time
- Linearity (linear chronology): the temporal order of succession of the events in the
story
- Fixed time-span or duration: clock time
- “singularness” of events: events only happen once in the exact same way and
conditions (vs déjà vu)
Analyzing time
- The analysis of the use of time in narrative centers around 3 aspects: order, duration
and frequency
1- Order: succession of the events in the story vs the order of their arrangement in
the narrative (plot)
2- Duration: time-span of events in the story vs the duration of their telling in the
narrative (length of the text/ complexity of detail)
3- Frequency: the repetitive capacities of the story vs those of the narrative
1-ORDER
- “The analysis of the connections between the story’s chronology and the order in
which the story’s events have been arranged in the narrative text (plot)”
- Anachronies: deviations from the natural (linear) chronology of the story
A-------- B-------- C-------- D-------- E (events in the story)

(Cinderella is born/ mother dies+ stepmother/grows up+ wants to go to the dance/ dance+ lost shoe/ the prince
finds her+ marriage)
1--------2--------- 3-------- 4-------- 5 (order of events in the narrative)
→ 1A-2B-3C-4D-5E: Perfect temporal correspondence between the story and the narrative
time→ no deviation from the original time of the story
→ 1B-2A-3D-4C-5E: Anachronie 1B: in media res / 2A: analepsis / 3D: prolepsis
- Techniques:
• Analepsis
• Prolepsis
• Complex anachronies
• Achrony

Analepsis (retrospection, flashback)
- A form of anachrony by which some of the events of a story are related at a point in
the narrative after later story events have already been recounted
- Used to fill in back ground information about characters and events
- We find analepsis in narratives that begin in media res
- Analepses may be introduced by a character (more subjective) or a narrator (more
objective in theory)
Prolepsis (anticipation, flashforward)
- A form of anachrony by which a future event is related as an interruption to the

present time of narration
- Types:
• Implicit:
“Not to put too fine a point on it, I fell head over heels in love with Catherine Courtney. Telling
her things, I’d never have told anyone. Which was regrettable, obviously in the light of what
happened”
• Explicit:
“Be lion-mettled, proud; and take no care who cares, who frets, or where conspirers are:
Macbeth shall never vanquish’d be until Great Birnam wood to Dunsinane hill Shall come
against him”
Complex anachronies
- Analepsis within prolepsis, prolepsis within analepsis…

“There was quite a bit of pie filling oozing around the edge of 1945. Filling that could be his. Everything had
improved for Macon Dead during the war. Except Ruth. And years later when the wat was over and that pie
filling had spilled over into his very lap, had stickied his hands and weighed his stomach down into a sagging
punch, he still wished he had strangled her back in 1921”
Achrony
- An achrony deprived from every temporal connection whose order in the sequence of
events cannot be inferred from the content
- Emphasizes a narrative’s capacity to disengage its arrangement from all dependence
on, and connections with, the chronological sequence of the story it tells
(We have no idea of which event happens 1st)
2-DURATION (rhythm)
- The analysis of the connections between the derivation of the story events and the
time devoted to their presentation through narrative discourse
- Difficult to compare: amount of reading time varies according to particular
circumstances—rhythm, speed, tempo (not if it is a short or long story)
- Narrative movements: devices that alter the rhythm of the narrative
• Ellipsis
• Summary
• Pause
• Slow-down

Ellipsis (omission, elimination of elements)
- A nonexistent section of narrative corresponds to some duration of story

- Narrative-time skips to a later part in story-time
- Permanent or temporary information gaps
“A day or two passed before Jane had courage to speak of her feelings to Elizabeth…” (Pride and
Prejudice, Jane Austen)
- In case of temporary gaps, ellipses are often linked with analepsis→ effect of surprise
when the missing information is provided
Summary
- Sweeping over relatively long periods of time using little textual space→ effect of
speeding up
- Story-time is longer than narrative-time
- Introduced by a narrator or a character
- Provide background information
(a lot of information is given in a short textual space)
Scene
- The equality of time between narrative and story

- Usually dialogs among characters (also through techniques such as interior monologue
and free indirect speech)
- Theoretically reserved for delivery of important information (about characters, the
events…)
- Classical narratives usually combine summaries and narrative scenes
- It is produced when
• The emphasis on summary→ tendency towards telling the information
• The emphasis on scene→ tendency towards showing the information
Pause
- What happens where some section of narrative discourse corresponds to a

nonexistent diegetic duration
- Story time comes to a standstill while the narrative times continues→ effect of
delaying the outcome of events
- It is produced
• By introducing non-narrative passages: a description, a narrator’s comment
• By diverting the narrative into a different direction for a little while (associated
with the building up of suspense)
Slow-down
- Narrative time exceeds story time→ effect of slow motion

- The narrative stretches a moment, usually to create suspense and during emotionally
charged moments
“Come in, ‘I said’, ‘just for a minute and rest.’ Whether this was a maternal instinct or a sisterly I cannot
say. But suddenly and enormous rush of tenderness went from me to him. I thought, he is like me, a little.
He has been cast out from his world, this world of Sligo. And I cannot say he looked like a villain. I cannot
say he looked like a murdering policeman of old, of his legend—not that I knew his legend then. Indeed,
and indeed, how little I knew about him, how rarely his brothers had spoken of him—only with heavy
sighs and meaningful looks. “‘No, I cannot,’ he said”
3-FREQUENCY
- The analysis of the relations between the repetitive capacities of the story and those
of the narrative
- It has to do with how many times an event takes place in the story and how many
times it is represented at the level of narrative discourse
- 4 possibilities
• Singular
• Plurisingular
• Repetitive
• Iterative
Singular narration
- The singularness of the narrative statement corresponds to the singularness of the

narrated event
- An event takes place once and is referred to once
- Most common relationship
Repetitive narration
- An event takes place once but is referred to repeatedly

- When a character is obsessed by an event and keeps coming back to it (ex:
traumatized) or when the same event is told from different perspectives (focalizations)
- Central technique in certain avant-garde novel (ex : Modernist fiction)
- Trauma narratives: re-experiencing the traumatic events, formal representation of
“acting out”
Iterative narration
- Where a single narrative utterance takes upon itself several occurrences together of
the same event
- Provides a short of informative frame of background
- An event takes place several times but is referred to only once (monotony routine,
habits)
“She always gave her entire wages—seven shillings—and Harry always sent up what he could but the
trouble was to get any money from her father. He said she used to squander the money, that she had no
head, that he wasn’t going to give her his hard-earned money to throw about the streets, and much more
he was usually fairly bad of a Saturday night, in the end he would give her the money and ask her had she
any intention of buying Sunday’s dinner. Then she had to rush out as quickly as she could and do the
marketing (…)”
(It only appears in the story once, but it is actually repeated constantly without being said)
Ex: se dice 1 vez que se desayuna cada mañana, pero la próxima vez ya no se dice porque se da por hecho que se
hace todos los días
Ex: alguien se queda sin dinero todos los sábados y le pide dinero a su padre. En lugar de contarse cada vez que va a
pedir dinero, solamente se cuenta una de ellas porque ya se da por hecho que al próximo sábado va a volver a pedir

NARRATION—PRACTICE
1. My mother was convicted of felony for a certain petty theft scarce worth naming […]. The
circumstances are too long to repeat, and I have heard them related so many ways, that I can scarce be
certain which is the right account. However it was, this they all agree in, that my mother pleaded her
belly, and being found quick with child, she was respited for about seven months; in which time having
brought me into the world […] she […] obtained the favour of being transported to the plantations, and
left me about half a year old; and in bad hands, you may be sure. This is too near the first hours of my
life for me to relate anything of myself but by hearsay; it is enough to mention, that as I was born in
such an unhappy place, I had no parish to have recourse to for my nourishment in my infancy; nor can I
give the least account how I was kept alive […].
Status: HOMODIEGETIC (+AUTODIEGETIC) + EXTRADIEGETIC narrator

Features: RELIABLE, INVOLVED, OVERT NARRATOR, SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS
Narrative levels: EXTRADIEGETIC+ INTRADIEGETIC level
Time of narration: SUBSEQUENT
2. In the second year of his retirement, the marchioness brought him a daughter, and died in three days
after her delivery. The marquis, who had tenderly loved her, was extremely afflicted at her death; but
time having produced its usual effects, his great fondness for the little Arabella entirely engrossed his
attention, and made up all the happiness of his life. Nature had indeed given her a most charming face,
[…] and an air so full of dignity and grace, as drew the admiration of all that saw her. These native
charms were improved with all the heightenings of art; […] From her earliest youth she had discovered a
fondness for reading, which extremely delighted the marquis; he permitted her therefore the use of
his library, in which, unfortunately for her, were great store of romances […].
Status: HETEREODIEGETIC+ EXTRADIEGETIC narrator

Features: RELIABLE, NON-INVOLVED, COVERT NARRATOR, NON-SELF-CONSCIOUS, OMNISCIENCE
3. When the usual hour arrived the grand-vizir conducted Scheherazade to the palace, and left her alone
with the Sultan […]. But seeing her eyes full of tears, he asked what was the matter. "Sire," replied
Scheherazade, "I have a sister who loves me as tenderly as I love her. Grant me the favour of allowing
her to sleep this night in the same room, as it is the last we shall be together." Schahriar consented to
Scheherazade's petition and Dinarzade was sent for. An hour before daybreak Dinarzade awoke, and
exclaimed, as she had promised, "My dear sister, if you are not asleep, tell me I pray you, before the sun
rises, one of your charming stories […]." Scheherazade did not answer her sister, but turned to the
Sultan. "Will your highness permit me to do as my sister asks?" said she. "Willingly," he answered.
So Scheherazade began.
The Story of the Merchant and the Genius
Sire, there was once upon a time a merchant who possessed great wealth, in land and merchandise, as
well as in ready money. He was obliged from time to time to take journeys to arrange his affairs.
Status: - HETEREODIEGETIC+ EXTRADIEGETIC narrator (A)

- HETERODIEGETIC+ INTRADIEGETIC narrator (B)→ secondary narrator
Features: -RELIABLE, NON-INVOLVED, COVERT NARRATOR, NON-SELF-CONSCIOUS, OMNISCIENCE (A)
-RELIABLE, NON-INVOLVED, OVERT NARRATOR, SELF-CONSCIOUS, OMNISCIENCE (B)
Narrative levels: EXTRADIEGETIC+ INTRADIEGETIC+ METADIEGETIC (with embedded story) level


4. Darl
Pa stands beside the bed. From behind his leg Vardaman peers, with his round head and his eyes round
and his mouth beginning to open.
She looks at pa; all her failing life appears to drain into her eyes, urgent, irremediable. "It's Jewel she
wants," Dewey Dell says. […] Then without looking at pa she goes around the bed and leaves the room.
She will go out where Peabody is, where she can stand in the twilight and look at his back with such an
expression that, feeling her eyes and turning, he will say:
I would not let it grieve me, now.
Status: HOMODIEGETIC (+AUTODIEGETIC) + EXTRADIEGETIC narrator

Features: RELIABLE, INVOLVED, OVERT NARRATOR, NON-SELF-CONSCIOUS, LIMITED KNOWLEDGE
Time of narration: PRIOR+ SIMULTANEOUS

PRESENTATION OF SPEECH AND THOUGHT –PRACTICE
1.Our father was actually fidgeting. “No, I just want to explain to you that—your Aunt Alexandra asked
me… son, you know you’re a Finch, don’t you?”
“That’s what I’ve been told.” Jem looked out of the corners of his eyes. His voice rose uncontrollably,
“Atticus, what’s the matter?”
Technique: DIRECT STYLE

Showing/ telling: SHOWING
Focalization: INTERNAL
2. He had never yet heard a young girl express herself in just this fashion; never, at least, save in cases
where to say such things seemed a kind of demonstrative evidence of a certain laxity of deportment.
And yet was he to accuse Miss Daisy Miller of actual or potential inconduite, as they said at Geneva? He
felt that he had lived at Geneva so long that he had lost a good Çdeal; he had become dishabituated to
the American tone. Never, indeed, since he had grown old enough to appreciate things, had he
encountered a young American girl of so pronounced a type as this. Certainly, she was very charming,
but how deucedly sociable! Was she simply a pretty girl from New York State?
Technique: FREE INDIRECT STYLE

Showing/ telling: SHOWING AND TELLING
3. But as soon as she saw him vexed again, she kissed his hand, and said she would sing him to sleep.
She began singing very low, till his fingers dropped from hers, and his head sank on his breast. Then I
told her to hush, and not stir, for fear she should wake him. We all kept as mute as mice a full half-hour,
and should have done so longer, only Joseph, having finished
his chapter, got up and said that he must rouse the master for prayers and bed.
Technique: INDIRECT STYLE

Showing/ telling: TELLING
Focalization: EXTERNAL
4. 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.
Technique: INTERNAL MONOLOGUE

5. I took the forks out of my son’s hands and put them in the dishwasher. “Do you drink coffee yet?”
“No,” he said.
“Baba likes a cup when she gets back from class.”
“Make her tea instead.”
Technique: FREE DIRECT STYLE
“She can learn, can’t she?”
“The two things have completely different tastes.”
“A habit’s a habit.”
“You have to acquire it first.”
“That’s what I’m saying. Make her tea.”
“Her class is more demanding than it sounds. Coffee relaxes her.”
CHARACTERIZATION+ FOCALIZATION—PRACTICE
1. Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is damp, drizzly
November in my soul; whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses,
and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet; and especially whenever my hypos get such
an upper hand of me, that it requires a strong moral principle to prevent me from deliberately
stepping into the street, and methodically knocking people’s hats off – then, I account it high
time to get to sea as soon as I can
Focalization: INTERNAL (focalizer is a participant)

Characterization: IMPLICIT / ROUND/ SELF-CHARACTERIZATION
2. “I give every man his due, regardless of religion or anything else. I have mothing against
Jews as an individual,” I says, “it is just the race”
Characterization: IMPLICIT/ ROUND
3. Mr Bennet was so odd mixture of quick parts, sarcastic humor, reserve, and caprice, that the
experience of three and twenty years had been insufficient to make his wife understand his
character. Her mind was less difficult to develop. She was a woman of mean understanding,
little information, and uncertain temper. When she was discontented she fancied herself
nervous. The business of her life was to get her daughters married; its solace was visiting and
news
Focalization: EXTERNAL
Characterization: EXPLICIT/ ROUND
4. Risky, thought Paul D, very risky. For a used-to-be-slave woman to love anything that much
was dangerous, especially if it was her children she had settled on to love. The best thing, she
knew, was to love just a little bit, so when they broke its back, or shoved it in a croaker sack,
well, maybe you’d have little love left over for the next one
Characterization (Paul D): IMPLICIT/ ROUND
Characterization (lady): EXPLICIT/ ROUND
5. there were days when she was very happy without knowing why. She was happy to be alive
and breathing, when her whole being seemed to be one with the sunlight, the color, the odors,
the luxuriant warmth of some perfect Southern day. She liked then to wander alone into
strange and unfamiliar places. She discovered many sunny, sleepy corner, fashioned to dream
in. and she found it good to dream and to be alone and unmolested
There were days when she was unhappy, she did not know why—when it did not seem worth
while to be glad or sorry, to be alive or dead; when life appeared to her like a grotesque
pandemonium and humanity like worms struggling blindly towards inevitable annihilation
Characterization: IMPLICIT+EXPLICIT/ ROUND

ANALYZING TIME-PRACTICE
1. She did not care to be mingled in their noisy dispersal: once in the street, she always felt an
irresistible return to her old standpoint, an instinctive shrinking from all that was unpolished
and promiscuous. In the days—how distant they now seemed! —when she had visited the
Girls' Club with Gerty Farish, she had felt an enlightened interest in the working classes; but
that was because she looked down on them from above, from the happy altitude of her grace
and her beneficence. Now that she was on a level with them, the point of view was less
interesting.
Order: ANALEPSIS
Duration (rhythm): SLOW DOWN
Frequency: ITERATIVE (habit in the past/ how she used to be in the past)
2. “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.
Order: -
Duration (rhythm): SCENE (real time)
Frequency: SINGULAR NARRATION
3. Roars of laughter from Martin, Jasper, Jenny and Jolyon. Mummy says we shouldn't have
the books: books need dusting! Roses, green grass, books and peace.
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
Order: -
Duration (rhythm): ELLIPSIS (something happened but Martha was asleep)
Frequency: SINGULAR
4. It was winter. Jess and Lorraine sat in movie theatres and held hands, then they sat in
restaurants where they drank hot chocolate and held hands. They walked in the snowy,
deserted Common, shivering, and held hands.
Order: -
Duration (rhythm): SUMMARY
Frequency: ITERATIVE

5. 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.
Order: -
Duration (rhythm): SUMMARY
Frequency: ITERATIVE
6. As he looked up and saw her, a car skidded up on the sidewalk and smashed her right
through the schoolyard fence, and she disappeared. The front end of the car was stuck
through the fence, and the wheels turned in the air. The police came, and there were a lot of
people, and when he went across the street to look, the woman was lying down in the
schoolyard; she had been carrying bottles of milk in her grocery bags, and the bottles had
broken and the milk was mixed with her blood, and glass was in it. (p.108)
Every moment of my waking life is intensified and I know exactly what is happening […]. And
we will be pinned, like the lady jammed through the schoolyard fence with her blood mixed
with the milk and broken bottles. And our blood will hurt as if it had glass in it. (p. 132)
Order: PROLEPSIS (because they are in diff pages) (if same page—complex anachrony)
Duration (rhythm): PAUSE (smth narrated, diff theme, smth narrated—same
as before)
Frequency: REPETITIVE (same event narrated at diff pages)

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Comentario de Textos Literarios en Lengua Inglesa

1º Grado en Estudios Ingleses

Facultad de Filosofía y Letras

Reservados todos los derechos.

PARTICIPANTS OTHER ELEMENTS

Narrative and life

- Narrative is a distinctive human trait, a ‘deep structure’

Narrative and time

- The representation of an event or a series of events

- Two kinds of time and two kinds of order

→ Determined by the story, by the events

si lees esto me debes un besito

- Story: abstractly conceived raw material of events

Story and plot

- Alternative distinction within narrative, derived from Russian Formalism

→ notion of szujet is less inclusive term than narrative discourse

→ “Plot”: commonly used as a synonym of “story”

The mediation (construction) of the story

- The story does not exist directly, only through representation

- A narrative is a construction (the reader constructs it from the narrative discourse;

Constituent and Supplementary events

- Constituent events: - Supplementary events:

si lees esto me debes un besito

- It is Who we “hear doing” the narrating

Features of the Narrative voice

- Reliability (reliable/ unreliable narrator)

si lees esto me debes un besito

- On the basis of the narrator’s relationship to the diegesis (story)

→ conclusion: 4 basic types of narrator’s status

- Extradiegetic + heterodiegetic narrator: a primary narrator who tells a story he/she is

- Narratives usually have several levels

→possibility of adding embedded narrative within the intradiegetic

- When a character in a narrative begins telling a story

- It is the temporal position of the narrator

si lees esto me debes un besito

- Distinction between voice (speaking subjectivity) and vision (perceiving subjectivity)

Types of focalization (Mieke Bal)

- Depending on the position of the focalizer

si lees esto me debes un besito

- Narrator’s discourse/ character’s discourse

- Direct quotation of a character’s speech (direct speech) or (verbalized) thought (direct

- Indirect representation of a character’s words or thoughts embedded into the

Free direct style

- Direct quotation of character’s speech (direct speech) or (verbalized) thought (direct

si lees esto me debes un besito

- Variant of free direct style

Free indirect style

Technique Filtering by narrator Narrative mode Focalization

Free direct style Unfiltered Showing Internal

Direct style Some filtering Showing Internal

Free indirect style More filtering Showing/ telling Internal

Indirect style Most filtering telling External

Telling → “John was angry with his wife”

- A textual figure (construct) to which the sensibility (feelings, intelligence, knowledge

si lees esto me debes un besito

→ Both, underreading and overreading may be influenced by our personal contexts

→ Both, underreading and overreading can be reduced to a minimum through text

Gaps and cruxes

- Filled by the reader in order to make sense of the narrative

Themes and motifs

- Repeated elements in a narrative text

si lees esto me debes un besito