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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).
