Oldal 24 [24]
Part I. Interdisciplinary Approach to Storytelling ] 23
Genette introduces categories of time for the analysis of narrative structure,
which are chronology, duration and frequency. The chronology shows the
order in which the events of a story appear in the narrative.? According to
Chatman (1999), a feature of the narrative is its dual temporal structure.
Regardless of the medium through which a story is actualized, the narrative
involves both the temporality of events in the story and the time in which the
events are presented in the narrative. These two temporalities are independent
of each other, and typical examples are flashback and flashforward.
The duration (i.e., how long an event unit is presented) is the factor
that determines the dynamics of the narrative, (i.e., how fast or slow the
narrative flow feels).* Genette also distinguishes between different levels of
narration. The outermost level of narration is the frame narrative (extradiegetic
narration). There may also be additional instances of narration within a
larger narrative (intradiegetic narration). A metadiegetic narrative is when
a character’s narrative appears within the frame narrative. As in syntax,
narrative situations can be related to each other in different ways. Two
situations may relate to each other in an additive way, or the relationship
between two narrative situations is said to be consecutive if the insertion of
one is necessary to explain the other. The insertion of a narrative situation
that cannot be explained at the level of the story is correlative, which is
given meaning through the reader’s interpretation. Bruner (1996) draws on
Ricoeur's (1984) theory that narrative time is humanly relevant time. This
means that only those events are relevant in the narrative that are important
from the point of view of the characters and the narrator. Bruner, like Propp,
therefore believes that the narrative is segmented by crucial events of varying
importance. According to Propp, the narrative text, regardless of genre, can
be viewed as the acquisition of a desired but limitedly accessible object or
device. The characters’ motivation is the link between the elementary units
of action found in the narrative.
2.3 Literature Theory
Bruner (1996) believed that people construct stories about reality as well as
fiction. In the analysis of narrative, the distinction between what happened or
did not happen is not decisive. Szegedy-Maszak (1998) distinguished between
four levels of a narrative text. The level of the text that is directly perceptible
2 Inanalepsis, the narrator recounts an event that happened before, and in prolepsis the narrator presents
a future event. In both cases, it may also be interesting to examine the distance of the flashback from
the time of the narration (i.e., whether or not it takes place outside the time of the narration).
3 This category includes compression or summary, the scene itself (the plot outline), the pause, and the
ellipsis, when a logically important event is left out of the narrative. In terms of frequency, events that
occur once can be told once (singular narrative mode) or several times (repetitive narrative mode),
and events that reoccur can be told once (iterative narrative mode).